ABSTRACT
The leadership of a Lean Information Technology (IT) organization can be described as the improvement engine of the whole organization. Where teams tend to focus on delivering work, leaders should help to ensure that improvement remains on the agenda of the team. The Lean IT leader must then facilitate the resolution of the problem through a kaizen event, or improvement kaizen. Both types of kaizen must be present in an IT organization to be able for it to say it is continuously improving. Daily kaizen is about learning proactively because the team is encouraged to improve their environment based not on fire-fighting but on a desire to make things better. In the course of doing daily kaizen, a team may come across a problem for which no one really knows the best solution, even a small step to alleviate the problem. Lean IT leaders must consciously choose to direct team effort towards solving problems through both daily and improvement kaizen.
