Lean Thinking — What, Why, and How

Moving Up, One Step at a Time

Not to brag, but I was already applying lean thinking in my professional life long before I knew about it. I stumbled upon this concept while trying to find ways to optimize my efforts and that of my team further. The more I researched about it, the more I was compelled towards applying these principles further in the workplace. A simple yet effective concept, you would think Lean Thinking would come to us naturally, but it doesn’t. To know more about this, read on.

What is Lean Thinking / Lean Methodology?

Lean Thinking or Lean methodology is a way of thinking to reduce waste, increase efficiency, focus on continuous improvement, developing skills and knowledge, and respecting people across all levels in an organization.

The Concept of Lean Thinking revolves around the 7 Lean Principles:

1. Optimize the Whole Process
2. Eliminate Waste
3. Build Quality Within
4. Deliver Fast
5. Create Knowledge
6. Defer Commitment
7. Respect People

Although they are essentially 7 guiding principles, the pillars of lean thinking are mainly Continuous Improvement and Respect for People. We will go in-depth about Continuous Improvement later in this post.

Optimize the Whole Process

Every organization has a value stream, It is a sequence of activities required to deliver a product/service or to achieve a milestone/end goal in an organization.

Therefore, if your goal is to provide as much value to your customers quickly, then optimize your value streams to move faster. We will talk about value stream mapping in detail later in this post.

Eliminate Waste

A simple way to understand waste in a business or an organization would be working on a product/service for which your customers are not willing to pay.

Waste in an organization could be for several reasons some of which are inadequate systems, bad communication practices across teams, multi-tasking on projects, etc.

Build Quality Within

With scale, the limitations of an organization's internal systems start to create a bottleneck for fast delivery. Lean thinking help organizations build sustainable systems, process, and teams.

The concept is simple to automate and standardize any tedious, repeatable process or any process that is prone to human error. This enables organizations to error-proof major portions of their value streams, enabling teams to focus on creating value for their customers.

Deliver Fast

The faster you deliver the product/service to your customers the sooner you will be able to learn from the feedback. The best way to understand this would consider you are working on a product with a talented team no matter how talented the team is not every real-life problem and use case be can be covered when the product/service has not gone to the end-users.

A lot of teams/people/organizations tend to focus on perfection instead of going to market fast and learning first hand which becomes an issue for creating a mark in the market.

Create Knowledge

A lean organization is a learning organization that grows and develops by analyzing incremental experiments. This knowledge should be shared among all the members of the organization and documented to retain valuable learning.

Defer Commitment

Simply means avoid committing to something until the last responsible moment to make decisions. Now you would ask why so? here is the answer when you defer commitment that needs to be done in the future you get more time to make informed decisions, with the most relevant and up-to-date information available.

This doesn’t mean you wait till the last moment of implementation to take a decision in that case it will just pressurize people in your organization leading to inefficiency and slower delivery rates.

Respect People

The success of any lean principle hinges upon respecting people, whether it may be respecting customers and taking the feedback to improve the product/service/business or your employees for whom you create an amazing work environment to do their best work.

Creating Lean Teams

The process of creating lean teams involves forming teams around a well-defined process and then continuous improvement and optimizing those processes. The roles and functioning of each team and the methodology for improving those processes must be clearly identified.

Each team must have the liberty to make reasonable changes to the process without being required to move through the traditional hierarchy in an organization.

Benefits of forming lean teams:

1. Improving communication among team members and teams.
2. Empowering teams to make decisions and effect change.
3. Cross-Functional Teams instead of a silo-based structure.
4. Improving the quality of the organization’s products and services.

The 5 Why’s Theory

The 5 Why’s Theory is based on a simple premise

When a problem occurs, ask the question Why? up to 5 times, until a viable solution comes into view.

This is a problem-solving technique designed to help organizations identify the root cause of the problem. Answer to each Why will help teams drill down on the issue a bit further until both the nature of the problem and solution becomes clear.

This process works well for small to moderate level problems but is less effective for complex problems where the questions involve multiple entities into play.

5 Why’s Theory will help the lean teams to focus on identifying a sustainable solution, instead of settling for a patch that will eventually mount to technical debt.

Continuous Improvement

Continuous Improvement is a method of identifying opportunities, reducing waste, and increasing efficiency.

Continuous Improvement Cycle

Benefits of Continuous Improvement

1. Streamlined Workflows.
2. Reduced Project Costs and Prevent Overages.
3. Reduced Technical Debt.

Value Stream Mapping

Value Stream Mapping is a lean management technique that helps organizations define steps involved for getting a product or service from inception to delivery.

Value Stream — It's the chain of actions taken to convert a customer request to a product or service.

Value Stream Mapping is 2-fold activity:

1. Identify the Value Stream
2. Optimize the Value Stream

Identify the Value Stream

The value stream of an organization can be identified by asking customer-centric questions such as:

1. What systems, processes, and technologies are involved in creating value for our customers?
2. What do our customers need and What does it take to satisfy that need?
3. Can we Optimize, Streamline and Automate the process to satisfy the needs of our customers?

Optimizing the Value Stream

The organization should function as a unified coordinated system and work towards a common goal.

Teams should work in a coordinated manner rather than a silo-based structure, teams competing against each other for resources resulting in lower delivery rates.

Teams can be independent to become more efficient, but if their improvements have negative impacts on other parts of the organization then their efforts are in vain. This can be avoided by having a proper communication methodology and Documented structure and intimations to other parts of the organization.

Conclusion

Lean thinking needs to be practiced and implemented with every entity in an organization on a daily basis to create a sustainable and scalable future for the organization.