Using The Fiery Sword Of Lean

With Agile Thinking To

Turbocharge Service

Management

Jonathan Hinkle

AVP, IT Operations

American Fidelity

Agenda and Objectives

• Tell the story of our Lean IT Journey…

• Develop a practical understanding of Lean in IT

• Understand how Lean, Kanban, KCS, and Agile intersect to improve

Service Management

• Roadblocks and Pitfalls to avoid

• Walk away with an approach to turbocharge your transactional team

on the road of Continuous Improvement

2

American Fidelity

• Founded in 1960, American Fidelity provides a different opinion for

Customers in the Education, Auto, Healthcare and Municipal

industries

• Specialists in supplemental benefits for our niche markets through:

– Disability Insurance

– Life Insurance

– Medical Excess Insurance

– Annuities

– Employer Administrative Services

• Nearly 2,000 Colleagues serving more than 1 million Customers

3

So, a lot happened in 2011…

• My Son was born

• Read The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt

• Read The New Rational Manager by Charles H. Kepner and

Benjamin B. Tregoe

• Accepted the Support Center Manager position at American Fidelity

4

We have a problem…

5

Helpless Desk

• Not respected – commonly called the helpless desk

• Little to no standardized work

• Didn’t answer phone calls, only Voice Mails

• Only other way was E-Mail

• Each agent had over 100 open tickets

• Hundreds of unassigned tickets in backlog

• Average Time Open measured in months

• MTTR measured in months

• First Level Resolution = 18%

• I got A LOT of calls from angry people

6

Looked for Help

Discovered ITIL – bought the books and read them

Discovered HDI – became a member

Discovered Lean – “The Fiery Sword!”

7

Isn’t Lean just a manufacturing

thing?

Who is my Customer?

Two initial assumptions

Lean Manufacturing Historic Timeline

http://www.strategosinc.com/lean_manufacturing_history.htm

9

Isn’t Lean just a manufacturing thing?

No!

Who is my Customer?

Who is my Customer?

"People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-

inch hole!“- Theodore Levitt

How we conduct Lean (Kaizen) Events

Create Charter

Form Team

Lean 101

Review Current State

Map

Pain Brainstorming

DOWNTIME Exercise

Solutions Brainstorming

MetricsFuture State

Map

Lean Tools Used

Action Plan

Celebration!

Champion

Process Owner

Value Stream Mapping

Duration = 5 Business Days

Daily Debrief for Stakeholders

Start

13

Current State Map

Start

15

Future State Map

Start

16

Lean Event Core Team

2011 – First Support Center Lean

17

Lean Tools Used

18

Results

• Reduced active assigned Incidents (~15 per analyst)

• Support Center Playbook

• Clear metrics

• Visual Dashboard

• Team cohesiveness improved

• MTTR = 8 Days

• First Level Resolution = 32%

• ASA = 20 minutes

19

2012 – The year of the Lean Sieges

• Support Center (Subject Matter Expert) Lean

• Change Requestor Notification Lean

• Mainframe Change Lean

• Temp/Contractor Onboarding Lean

20

The Phoenix Project

“The Three Ways”

• System Thinking

• Feedback

• Experimentation

“Any improvements made anywhere

besides the bottleneck are an illusion.”

21

2013 – The year of the Phoenix

The Phoenix Project

New IT Service Management Tool

ITIL

Fra

mew

ork

ad

op

tio

n

Incident

Problem

Request

Change

Knowledge

22

2014 - Systems Thinking

Incident Management Lean

Change Management Lean

New Colleague Onboarding Lean

23

2014 – MetricNet Benchmark

24

2015 - Bring the Feedback…back

Kanban Boards Knowledge Centered Support

25

Limit WIP

26

2016 – Agile Service Management

Individuals and Interactions

Working Software

Customer Collaboration

Responding to Change

Processes and tools

Comprehensive documentation

Contract negotiations

Following a plan

Over

While there is value in the items on the right,

we value the items on the left more

27

Agile Service Management

28

NO CHANGES ALLOWED!!

2016 – MetricNet Benchmark

29

Using the entire toolkit

Systems Thinking (TOC) tells you where to focus

Lean removes waste from the

process

Agile Service Management

sustains Continuous

Improvement

KCS creates the “Borg Hive Mind”

30

Roadblocks and Pitfalls

Organization Culture

Skimping on your Value

Stream

Technology Gap

Passive Executive Support

31

What we have planned for 2017

2017

ServiceNowImplementation

Enterprise Service

ManagementLean Six Sigma DevOps

2011

•ITIL

•Support Center Lean Part 1

2012

•Support Center Lean Part 2

•Change Requestor Notification Lean

•Mainframe Change Lean

•Temp/Contractor Onboarding Lean

2013

•The Phoenix Project

•New ITSM

•Service Management Adoption

2014

•Systems Thinking

•MetricNetBenchmark

•Incident Management Lean

•Change Management Lean

New Colleague Onboarding Lean

2015

•Kata Boards

•KCS

2016

•Limit WIP

•Agile Service Management

•MetricNetBenchmark

32

Thank You

Jonathan Hinkle

AVP, IT Operations

American Fidelity

Jonathan.Hinkle@americanfidelity.com

405.523.5593

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanhinkle1

Learn More: https://www.jonathanhinkle.com