In the race “to provide reliable and affordable cloud computing infrastructure for every person and organization on the planet,” Microsoft’s Mark Baracani faces significant challenges. As the company’s data center development global director of lean construction, he’s leading the effort to build data centers worldwide — as many as 50 to 100 centers annually, according to CRN.com.
To meet the company’s aggressive schedule — and do so safely, Baracani and his team have been working with LEI to apply lean principles and practices and, ultimately, cultivate a lean culture among the data center construction teams at the far-flung sites.
In a recent virtual presentation hosted by the Lean Global Network, Baracani and LEI Coach Karen Gaudet describe their efforts — along with the challenges they overcame and the significant results they achieved in experiments they’ve conducted at one center currently under construction.
Among significant outcomes, the team identified practices that enabled it to accelerate the build-out of one part of the data center, improve safety, and reduce the physical labor required. Still, the real value will compound into the future, as the construction teams share their new practices with others and continue learning at future sites.
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