In this paper, Emmanuel Jaunart and Audrey Rigo describe how they implemented a LEAN ICT approach into a public federal agency. The interest of this case relies upon the type of organisation in which the LEAN approach was implemented but also the innovative way they did it.

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Emmanuel Jaunart
Was born in La Hestre (Belgium) in 1964. He started his career as a
researcher in Telecommunication. In 1995 he joined Belgacom (incumbent
operator) where he mostly worked in the corporate planning department
(mergers & acquisition, company plan and business development activities).
In 2000, he is recruited by Devoteam Belgium where he became partner
and founder of the consulting department. In late 2008, he left Devoteam
Belgium as co-general manager for creating Mielabelo with two other
associates. His activities are now focused on continuous improvement.
Dr Jaunart is graduated “Ingenieur Civil Electricien” from the Polytechnic
Faculty of Mons (1988). He also holds a Master in Innovation Management
(2000) and a Ph. D. in Applied Sciences (1994) from the same institution.
Dr Jaunart is a member of ISACA and Lean SixSigma Black Belt certified.
A peculiar structure
Not collaborating together: this is probably a quite common situation for many ICT departments. But
on top of this “Checkpoint Charlie” mood, several issues were also hurting this specific department
effectiveness: a recent re-organisation, a support team under pressure because of a difficult Exchange
migration, the lack of resources, some job protection reflex and an ICT team overwhelmed by users’
complaints.
Beyond that, the organisation was a federal administration in Belgium. This means different cultures
(two different languages), organisational constraints and a traditional decision making scheme based
on hierarchy.
A plan for change
To improve the quality of service provided to the internal users, the Executive Committee launched
an improvement program across the whole organisation. They chose to go for a LEAN culture
implementation because of the good return provided in other industry sectors.
The LEAN approach was to be implemented in the whole IT department: service desk, project
managers, production, software development, analysts, architects, and so on. But compared to other
departments (e.g. HR, Accounting, etc.), the IT department had already experienced several quality
and alignment frameworks (ITIL, CobiT, Agile/SCRUM) with a relative success... or no success at
White paper 2 : Operational Excellence
Getting a Federal ICT department to listen to
the Voice of its Customers
In this paper, Emmanuel Jaunart and Audrey Rigo describe how they implemented a LEAN ICT approach into a
public federal agency. The interest of this case relies upon the type of organisation in which the LEAN approach
was implemented but also the innovative way they did it.
Introduction
Audrey Rigo
Started her career as a researcher/lecturer at University of Louvain and
the Free University of Brussels working on different European projects. In
2010, she joined European Think Thank to manage liberalisation and social
protection projects in Europe. Since 2011, she is working at the Federal
Agency for the Safety of the Food Chain in the staff of the VP Corporate
Services for Quality management, Lean methodology, Internal control and
Risk analysis. Mrs Rigo holds a Master degree in Political Sciences from UCL
(2004) and a DES in European Policy from ULB (2007).

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all! The challenge was therefore to manage an improvement journey sustained by those existing
frameworks while facilitating change management and addressing real and painfull inefficiencies.
The challenge is even bigger when internal users keep complaining about the poor quality of service
perceived: delays, poor communication, disorganisation, etc.
Instead of deploying complex standards and improvement waves, Mielabelo implemented a rather
specific approach.
A LEAN ICT journey
First of all, Mielabelo carried out several root causes analysis for inefficiencies identification based
on “moments of truth” with the internal customers and “Go & See” sessions with the IT teams. The
purpose was actually to listen to the customer’s voice, understand their “critical to quality” for rapidly
fixing IT inefficiencies and therefore preserve the customer quality.
Later on, the IT teams were introduced to the LEAN tools. Training sessions were given, highlighting
common points in traditional IT frameworks (ITIL, CobiT) with the LEAN approach. A specific training
material was also developed. This truly facilitated the tools acquisition process.
Finally, after an agreement to launch the initiatives was made with the IT management, Mielabelo
deployed specific LEAN tools for sustaining the continuous improvement journey.
The tools used and customised for the client were:
• A visual display setup for piloting and driving kaizens (improvement actions),
• Dedicated kanban segmentation adapted to the specific IT context, and especially to the
Scrum methodology used by most of their development teams,
• Value stream mapping brainstorm, leveraging ITIL best practices and CobiT process controls.
At the end of the entire process, significant results were achieved! As an example, it is worth mentioning
that the SLA breech for ticket resolution decreased from 5% to 0,5% and the ticket closing rate went
from 75% to 95%. Moreover, the structure was able to achieve such figures over only a three months’
time with a twenty-day coaching!
About Mielabelo
Mielabelo is the unique Belgian consulting firm sustaining the development of organizations through innovating
and pragmatic services. Our vision is that sales, information & operational processes improvement are three
strategic concerns that organizations must consistently align to achieve today’s & tomorrow’s success.
Mielabelo has organised its added value delivery by building a long term relationship with its customers and
developing packaged solutions (methods, tools, coaching) supported by knowledge communities centred around
“on pay roll” employees.
Started in 2009, Mielabelo is now rich of 35 employees.
More on www.mielabelo.com