Lean is a term used to describe the manufacturing process Toyota uses in their production facilities. It originated nearly eighty years ago and had many advantages over the manufacturing process that all the other auto companies were using, so it gave Toyota a significant advantage in the marketplace. Since then, all automakers have adopted some version of lean, and the concepts and methods have been distilled into five principles that have been applied to many other industries and processes.
What’s interesting is that from a high level, the lean principles look very similar to a traditional project management process. But if you tweak that process with just a few additional tools from Lean, you will experience significant improvements.
Here we will discuss how the lean principles can be applied to project management for complex projects.
The Lean Principles have five steps:
Identifying value simply means finding out what the customer wants—what they’re willing to actually pay for—and focusing only on that. Don’t spend time on things that don’t “add value”.
Map the value stream means understanding where that value comes from and then documenting the steps, resources, and time necessary to create that value.
Once you know where that value comes from and how it’s generated, work on every process step to eliminate bottlenecks, inefficiencies, or disturbances so the work proceeds with continuous and even flow.
Establish pull means to create a system where the work is started when the resource is available rather than pushing the work onto the resource when the work is ready. Work is started based on demand (availability) from the resource, not an artificial quantity or rate.
Seek perfection is essentially continuous improvement. Once you have the system running, start monitoring it and look for places where you can make improvements. Prioritize those by impact and implement them in the order that makes sense (value, resource availability, process readiness, etc.)
A formal project in a company is going to have one or more stakeholders who are essentially the customers of the project. They will determine the customer value in terms of a goal or outcome(s), and these are most likely identified as milestones in the project. The determination of what is or isn’t valuable will be agreed upon and outlined in the scope of work.
At this time the team will (or should!) create a plan that includes all the necessary steps as well as the required resources and time for each of those steps. All of the work that connects to the milestones is part of the value stream. Anything that does not contribute to the completion of a milestone is most likely out of scope and therefore not anything the customer wants to pay for.
Creating flow is partially done when the project manager performs the resource leveling. This reduces the delays caused by overloading when a resource has more work than they can do during any given time period. But this is where traditional project management diverges from the lean principles and becomes a push system with inefficient and ineffective feedback.
Traditional project management requires the project manager to maintain the schedule by asking the various resources for updates, making changes to the plan, and then telling the team members what to do. This is a slow and inaccurate form of feedback and results in team members working on things in the wrong order and working on too many things at once (multitasking). (Not to mention it’s a demeaning form of work for both parties.) So the status updates are slow and inaccurate, and delays happen without anyone knowing they occurred or what caused them. And morale suffers.
As mentioned above, the first step in creating flow in a project is to load level the resources. This was one of the significant contributions of Critical Chain Project Management and simply means adjusting the durations of the tasks based on the availability of the resource and spreading the work out so that each resource isn’t overloaded during any part of the plan.
Yes, it might extend the end date when you spread eighty hours of work for a single person over two weeks instead of one, but it makes the plan more realistic and helps you identify where you should consider adding additional resources.
But that is only the first step.
Within a normal project plan, there are dozens, hundreds, and maybe even thousands of tasks that require handoffs between resources—similar to moving parts to the next machine in a production process. These handoffs are a very likely place for disruptions to occur and also where the kanban process can be used to achieve results similar to those achieved by Toyota when they implemented it in their manufacturing process.
There’s a detailed description here, but the primary result is that it creates a pull system between each resource that extends throughout the production line, so every machine (resource) naturally works at the correct (and sustainable) pace.
Once you have established pull at the task/resource level within the project, it’s also possible (and very important) to establish a pull system at the company level for activating projects. Doing this requires the availability of data on resource loading within the active projects as well as knowledge of when the loading will occur for the critical resources within the projects in the queue. Most companies have not achieved this level of maturity so it’s a strategic advantage for those that have.
In a production environment where all the work is visible, the kanban cart and card are sufficient to create flow at the resource level. However, in a project where most of the work is essentially invisible, it’s necessary to use a visual work management system to create the same environment and benefits (flow, pull, managed WIP, eliminated multitasking, and sustainable pace for each team member).
The most common method for this is to represent the work with sticky notes and put them on a wall somewhere near most of the team members. This basic step has some benefits but the biggest gain in value is from the process used to manage these sticky notes. Software teams have a kanban method that works great for software projects, but as mentioned here complex projects (such as new product development) require a hybrid approach that combines a pull process with the traditional project plan.
When done properly, this single feature ensures that every team member will have correct priorities, every day, for all their projects. That benefit alone will remove the largest cause of delay for most complex projects.
Besides the benefits mentioned above, another key aspect of a properly implemented visual work management system is that it tells you “where you’re at”. There are many KPIs for any project or process, and they should be monitored and displayed in real time. This not only reveals problems before they impact the project, but it also provides valuable data for continuous improvement (kaizen) events.
Seeking perfection is the final lean principle and another area where traditional projects would benefit if they more closely followed the lean principles. Kaizen events can take many forms in manufacturing and are normally centered around the data collected by the visual work management systems.
Since our customers’ number one goal is to achieve predictable end dates, it’s important to collect information about what caused every delay to the major milestones (that represent the “customer value”). Notice that we are not concerned with every delay, just the ones that move the date of the major milestone. That is because the vast majority of task delays don’t impact the milestones—only the ones that happen to tasks on the critical path—so fixing them would have relatively little value.
If we capture the reason for every delay that moves the milestone, as well as the amount of delay it caused, we can use that information to identify and prioritize kaizen events that prevent them from happening in the future.
Playbook makes this easy by notifying the team members every time they make an update or change that moves a major milestone and prompts them to capture the impact reason.
In summary, lean principles and methods transformed the traditional manufacturing process and gave Toyota a competitive advantage that still exists today.
Traditional project management has a few steps in common with the five lean principles, but it is lacking in a few key areas. Adding them to your project management process will transform the results in terms of predictability and project velocity, and give you a sustainable advantage in program and project management.
If you would like to see these in action, register to watch this demo, or schedule a call to discuss the challenges you are facing.