ABSTRACT
When my editor, the late Raymond O’Connell, asked me to write this book, he mentioned that there was a gap regarding the use of information technology (IT) in Lean systems. As I planned to write the book, I looked at this gap from two perspectives. First, given that an IT project was deployed in a Lean environment, how should it be managed? Second, if Lean practitioners were asked to join these IT teams, what basic information would they need to be useful team members? In other words, how could their Lean expertise be useful to their team? As I did research for this book, it became immediately apparent that IT professionals have been working for several decades to create unique project management tools and methods to accelerate software creation and deployment. Although I already knew that such methods existed, I did not know their origin or extent of usage. This became apparent through research for this book. For example, I had the privilege to work with several Agile Project Management (APM) and scrum experts at C.C. Pace Systems in Fairfax, Virginia. These people included Tiran Dagan, who is currently the east coast director for NBC Universal’s Strategic Initiatives and Analysis, as well as Arlen Bankston and Sanjiv Augustine, now partners in Lithe Speed, LLC.
