Lean Tools in Project Management

This article is an overview and summery of which available lean tools you might use in project management. The purpose of this article is to give an overview of lean and how to approach lean in project management. This article will cover the background of lean, lean in project management and what lean tools and techniques are used to make the quickest duration of a project with reducing quality defects and boost productivity levels. The crucial for a p.....

Background

Introduction to Lean

Lean has been adopted by manufacturing companies in the past thirty-years. The philosophy is from the Japanese automotive industry and was introduced in the very late 1930’s as the Toyota Production System (known as TPS). Lean is basically about creating value for the costumer by eliminating waste and the principles seeks to have an effective and efficient production. The TPS system was in the beginning dedicated to the manufacturing industry, but during the past years have lean been established as an overall optimization philosophy for all kind of business’. The five principles of the philosophy:

1. Identify value
2. Identify the value stream
3. Create Flow by eliminating waste
4. Establish Pull
5. Seek Perfection

Description of Principles

1. Identify value is mainly about realizing that only small amount of spend time in the company that adds value for the customer. The purpose of the first principle is to eliminate the non-value activities (waste) and identify the activities which make value for the product or service.

2. Identify the value stream or value stream mapping is typically when the product from the very beginning of its lifecycle and across all activities to the end process to the customer. By identifying the value stream and create an overview of all the activities in the process, the overview of non-value activates will be apparent.

3. Create flow by eliminating waste ensures service/product flows to the customer with only value added activities. With only value-added activities, the waste has been removed and the seven different kind of waste are eliminated. Activities described as waste; defects, overproduction, waiting, non-utilized talent, transportation, inventory, motion, extra processing. The different kind of waste will not be described more detailed, otherwise go to “The 8 wastes”.

4. Establish Pull is a part of the Just in Time (JIT) principles. Understanding customers demand and only produce what customer wants when the customer wants it. By creating the value-added activities to respond to that pull has been established.

5. Seek Perfection is the fifth and last principle in the philosophy. After achieving the first four steps continuous improvements must be a part of the philosophy in the company. The aim must be zero waste although it’s impossible. Involve every employee within your company which is a part of the value stream.

Lean in Project Management

The five principles are the overall goal of lean and are mainly identical with behaviour in the organization, change management and improvement and a brief summary might be:

 - Improve quality

 - Eliminate Waste

 - Reduce Lead time

 - Reduce Total Cost

If these principles are implemented in project management the structure becomes different. The definition of project management: Project management is the application of processes, methods, knowledge, skills and experience to achieve the project objectives. The 8 different relates mainly to the production, not specific, there are some similar kind of waste in project management. Waiting, over processing and defective process are in any business where an implementation of the lean philosophy takes place. The creation of something the customer does not value is a waste. Waste in project management might be:

 - Status meetings, which are ineffective and too long to keep the participants interested

 - Too detailed plan. The schedule usually changes during a project period and it waste of time and a huge amount of rework.

 - Collecting inoperable data, this will never be used.

 - Push subproject and meetings, which ties up the team members and only satisfying the stakeholder but increasing the duration of the project.

 - Documentation which is never used

The goals of project management are to reduce the cost of the project or complete the project on budget. Furthermore the project must be completed on the estimated time and meet the performance requirements as agreed before the project began. To meet these expectations and requirements, the most efficient way to achieve this is by using tools, techniques and methods.