| Summary: | During the last decades the importance of IT has increased for businesses all over the world. It has transferred from only being used in administrative purposes to become more integrated to the core business. Due to the financial crisis in 2009 and increasing globalization, IT is facing the challenge of lower costs and increased efficiency. This requires IT-departments to embrace new strategies in order to fulfill these new tougher demands. Lean is a business development concept that aims to lower costs through more effective processes by removing all activities that does not create any value from the end customer’s perspective. Lean originates from Toyota’s Production System, TPS but is today used by healthcare providers, banks and IT-departments. This master thesis aims to develop a tool that can assess the opportunities for an IT-department to increase its efficiency through the use of Lean. This tool has been developed in cooperation with Niklas Larsson and is to be used by management and IT consulting company Connecta AB. To ensure that the tool is useful for the company four goals have been defined. They are that the tool should be reliable, should not require large amounts of resources, should be user friendly and identify areas that can be improvement through the implementation of Lean. The Lean IT Assessment Tool has been developed through interviews with consultants at Connecta, studies of literature and articles about Lean and Lean IT. The tool consists of three parts. The first part assesses the maturity of the IT-department from a Lean perspective. The second part is a questionnaire that aims to identify the employees’ attitude toward their work environment. The third is a value stream map, VSM, which aims to identify problems and bottlenecks in a specific IT-process. To ensure that the goals were met the tool was tested at a representative IT-department. The conclusions were that they were all reached and the continuation of the work is now left to Connecta AB.
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