How lean is your project?
Reduce costs, reduce schedule, improve quality all of this sounds fantastic, however, which lean methodology to apply is not immediately apparent.
Lean is many things to many people, and giving that Lean has been evolving over the past 100 years or more, and will continue to evolve, it is challenging to provide an absolute definition for Lean.
In the early 1900s, Fredrick Taylor began to define a “best way” to work. He identified the advantages of standardization of work methods and Henry Ford developed upon this initial work. Deming influenced the Lean movement and he is given credit for the emphasis on quality in lean methodologies. Deming’s “Plan, Do, Check, Act” or PDCA wheel is one of my favorite icons of all the Lean icons, and there are so many icons. There are also many tools and systems that have been developed over the years, Taiichi Ohno developed the Toyota Production System or TPS and introduced many new terms and concepts the most fundamental being “Just In Time” (JIT) and value stream mapping. So many great people impacted the Lean evolution and James Womack book “The machine that changed the world” summarizes this much more accurately than I ever could.
Lean has been defined as the identification and elimination of waste, but I believe this definition only gives us part of the solution. Embarking on waste reduction efforts without a clear connection to the end product can be counterproductive, and the end result will most likely be ineffective or short-lived. A better definition for this is the maximizing of customer value while minimizing waste, with the additional focus on the customer value we will manage to leverage better results.
While we can always remove “low hanging fruit” and should ensure our teams and organizations develop an awareness for the recognition of wasteful activities in our businesses, we also need to ensure that massive energy is not devoted to creating a lean process when in fact the correct action would be the elimination of that process altogether. The question we continually need to ask ourselves is “are we maximizing value to the customer?” By removing project scope or a product feature we might reduce cost and schedule, but have we maximized our value to the customer? Will this scope reduction impact the total cost of ownership? Will the feature reduction impact future technology development?
As Lean continued to evolve we saw the adoption of Lean principals to software development result in Agile, which was created in 2001 in an effort to overcome the age-old problem of scope change and more specifically the phenomenon of discovering upon the completion of a project or program that the end product no longer met the customer’s needs. The Agile philosophy has resulted in several methodologies in assist in its implementation; Scrum, XP (Extreme Programming), FDD (Feature Driven Development) among many others. Agile marks a move away from the traditional waterfall management techniques where we map out a project from start to finish and only when all tasks are complete is the project considered complete. Instead, we are required to examine the desired project outcomes and focus on delivering the outcomes on an as needed basis. This reduces the amount of time invested in tasks over the lifetime of the project will become obsolete, it provides live feedback from the end customer which enables us to maximize customer value.
It cannot be denied that these tools and methodologies have led to improvements in our productivity, each tool with its own strengths and weaknesses. But like all tools, they are dependant on the people using them and the way they are used.
The main challenge the Lean poses in my experience is the balance between macro and micro. If we engage in Lean on a micro level, we gain efficiencies and learnings but often our focus less than optimal. Engaging in Lean on a macro level by its nature is challenging and requires accuracy in order to be effective. Lean which was born in the manufacturing industry, and strongly influenced by the automotive industry, has been adopted by agriculture, construction and software development. The desire to reduce waste is relatively intuitive but like all human endeavors, everything is open to error. Given that these errors provide us with learning opportunities, Lean can only be seen as a “win-win” situation. In order to ensure we are implementing Lean in an efficient manner either on the macro or micro level, our guide or test should always be the relationship to customer values.
