Lean: Principles¶
The core idea of Lean is to maximize customer value while minimizing waste. A lean organization understands customer value and focuses its key processes to continuously increase it.
To accomplish this, lean thinking changes the focus of management from optimizing separate technologies, assets, and vertical departments to optimizing the flow of products and services through entire value streams that flow horizontally across technologies, assets, and departments to customers.
There are 5 principles in Lean.
Contents
Identify value¶
Value adding activities: We need to maximize the investment on value-adding activities.
Non-value adding activities: Some activities do not create value but is still necessary, e.g. admin meetings. We need to be careful about the time spent on these activities.
Waste: Waste does not create value for a customer, e.g. Partially Done Work, Extra Processes, Extra Features, Task Switching, Waiting, Motion, Defects. Waste needs to be eliminated.
Mainly, the root cause of waste can be categorized into followings:
Lack of understanding customers
Lack of standard procedure and system
Lack of communication and control
Lack of responsibility and competence
Map the value stream¶
Mapping your value stream is a good way to start discovering the waste in your software development process. Value stream is a series of activities that must be done in a certain order at the right time to deliver a service.
Your Value stream map is a representation of the flow of materials from supplier to customer through your organization as well as the flow of information. This enables you to see at a glance where the delays are in your process, any restraints and excessive inventory.
Your current state map is the first step in working towards your ideal state for your organization.
Value streaming mapping will be explained in my later blog.
Create flow¶
After the waste has been removed from the value stream, the next step is to be sure the remaining steps flow smoothly with no interruptions, delays, or bottlenecks.
Establish pull¶
With improved flow, time to market (or time to customer) can be dramatically improved. This makes it much easier to deliver products as needed, as in “just in time” manufacturing or delivery. This means the customer can “pull” the product from you as needed.
Let customers’ needs pull the work rather than have a schedule push the work
Quite often, production workers were blamed for not doing exactly what was scheduled, but that was hardly the problem. The problem was that when even the smallest glitch arose, the schedule became invalid, and from then on, following the schedule just made things worse. Just-in-time changed all of this by bringing the concept of pull scheduling to manufacturing. Pull systems use a mechanism called Kanban, which was originally patterned after restocking grocery store shelves
Seak perfection¶
Making lean thinking and process improvement part of your corporate culture. As gains continue to pile up, it is important to remember lean is not a static system and requires constant effort and vigilance to perfect.
At the same time, be careful that do not let perfection to be the enemy of good!
Written by Binwei@Oslo
