Lean Project Management is proof that the lean principles could be employed profitably in many other areas. Delivering values from your customer's perspective and getting rid of waste and continuous improvement help project managers improve projects' efficiency and deliver more by less.
In contrast to classical project management, which has clear phases to separate planning from execution, Lean project management enables teams to work much faster through improved workflow. Project managers must always view value creation through the eyes of the customer. To have an excellent grip in project management enroll yourself in the project management course of the British Academy of training and development.
How was the lean project management methodology created?
The actual lean project management methodology arose between1948 and 1975 as Japanese engineers working at Toyota leaned on the original Toyota Production System (TPS). Under TPS, manufacturing processes were enhanced, relationships developed with suppliers and customers, and waste was reduced.
In his book, The Toyota Way, Dr. Jeffrey K. Liker laid out the principles of lean management and offered a guideline as to how it could be applied by industries outside of TPS. He also mentions various types of corporate waste that the TPS and therefore lean management may eliminate.
In essence, John Krafcik in his 1988 article "Triumph of the Lean Production System" presented the lean approach to project management. Krafcik's thesis at MIT Sloan School of Management gave rise to the article, which simultaneously laid the groundwork for the modern bestseller "The Machine That Changed the World." The lean project management system became a strong influencer to a whole spectrum of methodologies, notably Agile, Kanban, and Scrum.
Why Lean management is important
Most sectors including IT, construction, and education have adopted the lean methodology for its many rewards offering improvements in value to products by streamlining processes in lean project management. Lean management has other benefits such as:
Increase Innovation: Creativity makes projects better. Reduces Waste: Physical waste with waiting times in the production process, avoids waste overproduction and over processing. Better Customer Services: Enough for a customer, neither more nor less. Better Lead Time: Fast and less delay in response. Higher Quality Products: Checks quality thus reducing defects. Improvement in Inventory Management: Prevents setbacks by monitoring inventories.
Adopted in an organisation by either internal or external stakeholders, the lean thinking is in creating uncomplicated work processes and more efficient project teams.
Lean Management Tools for Your Work
Integrating Lean principles into project management is not a one day affair. It is dedication, and the whole team organisation must be involved to see change happen. Good first steps in starting with lean may include gaining a particular tool, like these:
PDCA in Lean Project Management
The Plan Do Check Act cycle is a vital tool for lean manufacturing and is sometimes called Deming Cycle. PDCA CycleAs the picture shows, it is a multi stage method that contains experimentation, analysis of results, and improvements to avoid recurrence of mistakes and enhance operations in a team's work. PDCA is inducted with its iterative approach to ever improving products, services, and team performance in an overall sense.
A great way to internalize the culture of solution testing on a small scale into lean project management is to minimize rework opportunities, increase customer satisfaction, and best of all encourage continuous improvement thinking.
It would be to plan, execute, and test a potential solution but as an experiment. Then you would analyze the outcome from the customers' viewpoint to possibly adopt, optimize, and, if necessary, repeat.
When incorporated properly in your project management process, the Plan Do Check Act will give you one more ingredient that brings built in project quality.
Principles of Lean Project Management
The five principles of lean project management set specifics for the best path to reach maximum customer satisfaction. When followed, these principles increase the chance of reducing product waste while securing project scope and meeting critical success factors.
1. Value identification
The first principle of lean project management identifies the value of the product. With that knowledge must come an understanding of the people involved stakeholders. There would be situations in which project deliverables will be for internal stakeholders; other times, the project customer becomes an external stakeholder.
Internal stakeholders are those who have a stake in the success of the project monitoring the development of the product. External stakeholders are customers purchasing the product or service, wherein their quality matters to them.
Depending on the type of person for whom the product is built, an assessment can be made of what creates value for them. Product value for an internal customer may mean solving an internal operational problem. Product value for an external customer may mean solving a customer problem or simplifying life for a customer.
2. Value Stream Mapping
In normal project management, the next step would be taking everything to the point of creating a project plan with a work breakdown structure and tasks. But, applying Lean principles to project management means it will focus on value only.
Following the value stream mapping, one has to go for the value stream map. The aim of that map is to impart how and where the value is being created in your organization/team. Additionally, it provides clarification of the entire process so as to identify defects or unnecessary steps and these can be removed. This way, you will have saved resources wasted into delivering more with less. Eradication of these wasteful steps could also favorably impact delivery time.
Most of the time, Kanban is the first choice with such visualization of a value stream. At Businessmap (formerly Kanbanize), mapping it on a kanban board gives us a direct glimpse of the big picture. This way, we could optimize not only a slice of our performance but also the aggregate operational efficiency.
3. Make it Streamlined
This will involve needing to add efficiency to your project management plan and tossing away the waste identified in action two. Place every stage of product development under the microscope for investigation and reconfigure steps, when needed. Use project milestones as checkpoints so that the project does not develop new wastes as it proceeds.
For instance, during step two, you registered a backlog mismanagement issue as well as a delayed timeline due to backups in scheduling of actual team member release holes. This is where you can understand how to eliminate those pain points and reintegrate the entire project plan back together.
By creating such channels of open communication between team members, you can guarantee that every second put into the creation of your VSM wasn't wasted. After the discovery and removal of waste, everyone needs to work together in the future in maintaining the waste less solutions built into their projects."
4. Establish Pull
Establishing pull indicates that work is taken from the previous process stage as it is completed. This concept has its roots in manufacturing, for helping factories meet exact demand by way of a "just in time" inventory system. But a pull system is also beneficial in other sectors, where it helps to ensure that work progresses efficiently.
Example pull system in software development:
The tech designer completes the work and flags the product for review.The review flag signals the start of the coding stage.Your coder finishes their work and flags the product for review.The review flag signals the start of the testing stage.The product tester finishes the work and flags the product as ready for final review.You observe the final review of the product.
Establishing pull assists teams of every kind, by allowing their work to flow seamlessly through the project life cycle. Where there are consumer facing products, pull signals assist the teams in working backwards. In that way, their team produces inventory only when it is needed by the consumers