After a long week I just feel like ranting.



Big Consultants Use "Lean" Buzz to Take Advantage of Bureaucrats



So recently I had the privilege to witness a monolithic enterprise attempt
to roll out an SDLC process, "they" call Lean. To protect the guilty I
won't use any names, but it is safe to say "they" are a large, bureaucratic
organization with an IT department larger than 10,000 employees and
consultants. And "they", the consulting firm that is responsible for
architecting and enabling the process for the enterprise, are one of those
top five household brands, full of arrogance and oblivious to their short
comings.



It all started with sexy slides talking about lean thinking, reducing waste,
and saving big dollars. The enterprise executives bought into it, and the
game was on. Our big firm consultants, as if following a play from the
book, "How to Lie with Statistics", came up with some incredulous story
about how they could baseline a currently unmeasured slew of $2B in IT
projects and shave off 20% with their Lean IT Initiative.



And now, four months later what I'm seeing is a full blown RUP rollout, from
big firm consultants who think RUP isn't prescriptive enough and believe
that building a wide array of enormous models is the way to go. The process
definition contains no evidence of the lean practices the big firm
consultants promised in their sales pitch. If they believed in the
buzz-word "Lean Thinking" they threw around so loosely, then surely they
would realize there is little to no customer value in models, and that
models should be used more sparingly to solve complex problems.



I tried to warn them, "RUP isn't meant to be consumed in its entirety.
Someday someone will add up the number of all those required work products
you have added to the bureaucracy and laugh that you called this the Lean IT
Initiative. Wake up!" But they didn't hear me through their arrogance and
the high burn rate flowing into their bank account. They didn't seem to
care that their reputation as a consulting brand would be tarnished in the
eyes of one enterprise after they were gone.



The saddest part is that it will probably take the enterprise years to
figure out they have been bamboozled, and the opposite effect of lean has
occurred. However, they will still slice 20% from their IT budget and then
wonder why they aren't keeping up on technology with their competition.



The excuse I've heard these consultants say to me on the side, "Lean will
only save you the last 2-4%. We are saving that for later." They don't get
it.





Fourth Medium Consulting, Inc.

Carson Holmes, Principal Consultant

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