Change management lessons learned for Lean IT implementations

Lean Management is a standard production mode that has been familiar to production organizations for several decades. To date, however, academic literature has presented surprisingly little information about the application of Lean Management in Information Technology (IT) organizations, or what is called Lean IT. Drawing upon an empirical qualitative case study of the IT departments of two multinational companies, in this paper we identify change management lessons learned for Lean IT implementations, as well as seven characteristics of a corresponding change management approach. As an extension of our work, researchers should validate and expand our initial findings, preferably in a quantitative setting

Lean Management of IT Organizations – A Perspective of IT Slack Theory

Lean Management has been successfully implemented in production organizations since several decades. The study at hand investigates the implementation of Lean Management to IT organizations (Lean IT). The study offers three contributions: First, it explains on a conceptual level how Lean Management can be transferred from production to IT organizations (philosophy, principles, tools). Second, it provides a theoretical perspective on why Lean IT can be beneficial for IT organizations (IT Slack theory). Third, it provides insights to the stated research questions (three benefits and three propositions) from an initial case study of an internal IT service provider for a large international insurance company (\u3e US$25 Billion revenue; \u3e20,000 employees; active in \u3e120 countries) and lays out the research methodology and potential focus areas for further studies

Slack-performance relationship before, during and after a financial crisis: empirical evidence from European manufacturing firms

This thesis studied the slack - performance relationship under different external environments by taking advantage of the financial crisis of 2008-09, which provides a natural experiment opportunity for the study. Besides the management of slack, adaptation profiles are also examined by building the two-stage adaptation process model in concordance with different period of financial crisis. Based on empirical analysis and theoretical research, this thesis finds that slack management impacts the firms' performance as well as firms' adaptation to respond to financial crisis. Another novelty of this thesis is to examine ambidexterity in detail by employing constructs of alignment and adaptability from the perspective of organizational slack. Thesis tries to evidence that European manufacturing firms have various adaptation processes, profiles and risk-taking behaviors with varying performance implications based on their slack management in response to financial crisis. To that end, this study investigates empirically, publicly-held 671 western European manufacturing firms, by comparatively examining their organizational slack management and performance characteristics before, during and after the recent financial crisis period 2007-8 . This research employs longitudinal panel data. The data was drawn from Thomson one banker database for the period of2004-2013