Lean Project Management And Its Principles and Tools [2022]

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In your career, you may have dealt with a project that seems out of control. Whether you’re the one that got hijacked or you’re the one that initiated it, you should have the tips and tricks to take back control.

Project managers may improve their project efficiency and provide more with less by reducing waste, providing value from the standpoint of their customers, and continually improving.

It’s best to first take a deeper look at the foundations of Lean and its function in project management to see how this works.

Table of Contents:

• What is Lean Project Management?
• Benefits of Lean Project Management
• Five Key Principles of Lean Project Management
• Lean Project Management Tools
• In Summary
• Frequently Asked Questions

What is Lean Project Management?

Lean Project Management is effective project management methodology that works in lean manufacturing. The lean methods can also work in any project, and not just manufacturing. Toyota created this methodology to identify the sources and eliminate waste from the production line, improve quality, and lower the cost of producing a product.

It can also work in software projects, achieving major effects on the cost of software development and producing more reliable, maintainable, and productive code. In the lean world, a project is everything that happens during the development and deployment of a product.

Benefits of Lean Project Management

Lean is a management philosophy based on the idea of continually making things more efficient to produce more results. It is a professional approach to achieving lean principles. It is about achieving the best possible results with as little work and effort as possible. No matter what project you work on or assign, having a Lean Project Management mindset will make executing the project much easier and more achievable.

Some of the Key Benefits of Lean Project Management are:

• A better understanding of the production process.
• Increased control, improved decision-making, and team empowerment.
• Increases output and business morale.
• Alternate means of completing deliverables are offered.
• Faster projects since there are fewer challenges to address.
• Increases earnings since it produces less waste and creates more value.
• Improved client satisfaction.
• Shorter lead times.
• Lower expenses for storage and inventory.
• Decreased expenditures overall.
• Increased effectiveness and productivity.
• Higher quality.
• Increased client satisfaction.

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Five Key Principles of Lean Project Management

1. Value Identification

This is the process of going around the project to identify all the aspects of the project to establish a value. When discussing the project, it relates to the group of people involved and the quality of their involvement.

By defining objectives, requirements, deliverables, and acceptance criteria, lean project managers can discover and describe value from the perspective of the consumers. The consumer is willing to pay for the project’s value or outcome, so this should ideally come straight from the consumer and be expressed in their terms.

2. Mapping the Value Stream

Mapping the value stream of a company or organization is the first step in identifying the value that work activities generate to ensure that the right work gets done. The value stream is everything that goes into creating the product or service. There is always a waste stream associated with the value stream, where there are missed opportunities to do things efficiently and smoothly. This means workers are not doing the activities they should focus on, or do not complete activities according to the plan.

3. Eliminating Waste to Create Flow

The next priority is ensuring the project can proceed without delays, snags, or other systemic problems, or to achieve continuous workflow in your project. You must first get rid of the waste operations from your process in order to do this, though.

Because waste is systemic, you shouldn’t just reduce it as you move through the value stream, you must find ways to eliminate the waste that has accumulated over time to identify and eliminate waste that can persist as you complete all the value stream activities.

4. Pull the Stream

Teams in a variety of sectors might benefit from establishing pull since it keeps work flowing smoothly across the project life cycle. If pull signals are used to operate backward, industries that make consumer-facing items will gain from this approach. In this manner, their staff only creates inventory as needed by clients.

This is a practice you should expect to find in manufacturing unless the industry in question is one of the many that value pulling the value stream.

5. Continue the Improvement

You must put the five principles into practice, but doing so shouldn’t be a mechanical process, as it must be motivated by a spirit of constant reflection, creativity, and adaptation. The search for perfection means that there is no end to improvement. We should always consider the worth of all of our endeavors. While we may inevitably fall short of perfection, we must continually work to improve.

Lean Project Management Tools

Lean Project Management is an emerging methodology that focuses on creating business value for both your company and customers. This methodology is growing especially in the construction environment. With Lean, companies are creating more efficiency, cost savings, and improvements to the overall process.

Below are some of the lean project management tools:

Bottleneck Analysis

A systematic approach to examining the workflows and processes involved in creating a product or service is bottleneck analysis. By identifying and correcting operational and process concerns, bottleneck analysis also addresses both current and future issues.

Value Stream Mapping

Lean manufacturing inspires the development of the value stream mapping approach. To analyze and improve the entire process, organizations utilize it to produce a visual guide of all the parts required to offer a product or service. This approach uses a flowchart to represent all the people, processes, data, and inventories necessary to gain a complete picture of the firm.

Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA)

In Lean project management, PDCA is an effective technique to create a culture of smaller-scale solutions testing, reduce possible rework, boost customer satisfaction, and foster a continuous improvement mindset. Planning, carrying out, and testing an experiment to evaluate a proposed solution is the objective. After that, you should consider the findings from the viewpoint of your consumers in order to adapt, improve, and, if needed, repeat the cycle.

Root Cause Analysis (RCA)

A method for identifying issues, and underlying causes, and a methodical approach to solving them is known as root cause analysis (RCA). The foundation of root cause analysis is the premise that efficient project management should discover a means to prevent issues before they arise and have an impact on the operations of a complete business.

Lean Six Sigma (DMAIC)

The DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) is a data-driven, analytical method for identifying and fixing flaws in operational processes, goods, and services. DMAIC, which emphasizes lowering variance and faults, results in gradual advancements.

Lean Management (DMEDI)

The creative design process (Define, Measure, Explore, Develop, Implement) creates innovative, reliable processes, products, and services. The goal of this path is to achieve substantial competitive advantages or quantum jumps above existing ecosystems. The completion of DMEDI projects often takes more time and money.

In Summary

A team working on a project may operate it as efficiently as possible by following the set of rules of lean project management. The guiding principles form the basis of how a project is managed. These five fundamental ideas serve as the cornerstone for numerous tools that improve projects for all teams (including yourself). You may learn efficiency in daily life by pushing yourself to understand these ideas.

For more information on project management software and methodologies read our blogs.

For courses on project management and tools please check our course list.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Simon Calder

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!