Utilizing educational lean to enhance the information technology project intake process

Abstract

Winona State University utilized the Lean principles of process improvement (five high-level values principles to eliminate wasteful steps within a process) to enhance the project intake process for IT. Prior to 2009, Winona State's IT Department struggled with the successful completion of projects and decided to take a unique approach to resolving the issue. This approach allowed a core team of individuals to spend a focused amount of time documenting and discussing the current process, researching best practices, and brain storming ideas for a new and improved process. At the end of the four-day Kaizen event, a new process was proposed and presented to a larger group of stakeholders for feedback and approval. After multiple revisions to the initial proposal, the new process was implemented in August of 2009.The process that now currently exists for IT project requests is documented on Winona State's website, http://www.winona.edu/it/itsprojects.asp. It allows for project owners and community members to make their requests online and includes automated communication back to them notifying them as to the status of their request. An IT project team reviews requests on a weekly basis, approves, denies or defers the requests, and assigns a project lead to communicate back with the requester. All approved, deferred and completed projects are tracked and displayed to campus via a project dashboard.The new process centralizes the documentation of all project requests and their statuses. This allows for more thorough research of requests to ensure alignment with the Campus Technology Master Plan. It promotes better communication between the IT units and allows for realistic expectations to be set to the WSU community. The return on investment has been great as we've shown an increase in the number of significant IT projects completed, as well as an increase in customer and stakeholder satisfaction.