Depending on who you ask, Lean will be described as a philosophy, a production system, a way of life, a set of tools, a way of thinking or mindset, a framework to develop software, long-term strategic planning, or many other things.
In a nutshell, Lean is the elimination of waste out of processes. Waste is everything your customer doesn’t care about, not willing to pay for or process steps that do nothing to transform either material or data into products or information the customer is willing to consume.
The opposite of waste is value. And value is defined by your customers.
Lean is also the implementation of flow and pull in your processes. Which means that every time something is sold (a customer pulls off a product), a production order to replace only that inventory is triggered. It goes from step to step from beginning to end without stopping.
This is way easier said than done. But we make it easy developing a team that will help develop solutions and improve processes in what we define as a “lab”. An area where we set the conditions for continuous improvement to flourish.
Agile (iterative and incremental approach to projects/software) and Scrum (agile framework with time-boxed iterations called sprints and daily stand-up meetings) were born out of the need to improve the way software is developed since teams were challenged to building something appealing and useful for their customers who didn’t know what they wanted or needed.
How do you read minds? How do you anticipate changes? How do you forecast the future? You don’t. It is impossible, but certainly something creative needs to happen.
Before they were called Agile or Scrum, these frameworks were called “lean software development.” Interestingly, the same tools applied to “lean” software development apply to all project work and most non-manufacturing environments and markets, such as healthcare, financial services, lodging, airport operations, and government.
Agile took the tools and concepts of Lean and changed “perfect quality,” defined as doing things right the first time, for “short cycles of real customer feedback,” which allows a team to act on feedback and change quickly within a framework of commercial and technological constraints. Agile also changed takt time—producing at the rhythm of customer demand—for team focus time, letting a team pull work in enough chunks to be completed in a predefined short period of time called “sprints.”
Lean can be applied to project management to eliminate waste, especially waiting, overproducing or overplanning, developing lengthy plans, or thinking quarterly or annually instead of in minutes and hours.
We help companies, small, medium and large solve complex problems and meet customer expectations through controlled experiments on your processes. Demonstrating value delivery in the short and long term.
