How Lean Project Management Can Improve Team Efficiency.
This is a guest post by Jasmine Williams. Thank you, Jasmine for writing this for me. You can learn more about Jasmine’s work on Twitter here
The primary purpose of lean project management is to deliver greater value while utilizing minimal resources and reducing any kind of waste.
The lean management approach is, therefore, perfect for improving quality and decreasing the cost of production. It enables managers to improve all the processes to enhance the effectiveness and productivity of the project team.
Cutting down on the wastage of resources and time leads to delivery of higher value in the long run. Here is how lean philosophy enhances the efficiency of the system:
Improving the efficiency of the worker and encouraging them to create defect-free products or services.
Anything that is not adding value is reduced or eliminated to streamline production and optimize costs.
Efficient implementation of an ‘on-demand’ production mechanism to reduce the time and expense of inventory management.
Here are a few ideas that you can leverage to implement lean management:
1. Transform your Technical System
The majority of lean approaches fail not because they are unable to grasp the technique and tools but because they fail to efficiently adapt to the change management.
To achieve a strategic lean management approach, managers need to work in process-oriented teams. Teams should become purely self-directed to ensure problems are picked up automatically by the person concerned and then solved among the team.
For instance, to devise an efficient process, the manager needs to do the following things:
Ask questions about the current business process and have a freewheeling discussion with the team members about the gaps and challenges they are facing
Create a new flowchart addressing all the concerns
Move backward with the existing process. Take a step-by-step approach to resolve the issues
Reduce the complications and overwhelming number of steps
Make team members understand the need for new processes and how it will help them and the business
Implementing these steps prevents the tedious process of managers having to pick up any issues themselves and assign it to the right person for a solution.
1. Well Equipped Team
It is crucial to get experienced and talented facilitators who possess a deep understanding of lean philosophy and tools while keeping the training focused on a specific problem.
It’s best to train the facilitators in-house so that their skills and talking points can align with your business. This enables the business to keep the training relevant to real-world conditions for tangible outcomes.
You can refer to the Kaizen workshop, which focuses on making rapid changes to reduce the time.
A Kaizen workshop is basically a group activity, where a team gathers for about five days to analyze and implement certain improvements in the way they do things.
Here’s what a five-day Kaizen workshop looks like:
Kaizen workshops help you with creating continuous flow cells within five days.
As per the Kaizen workshop, cellular/flow manufacturing includes the linking of machine and manual operations. This is done to combine the most efficient resource to achieve value-added content with minimal waste.
The process helps you ensure a continuous flow of products, minimal parts movement, reduce wait time, lesser inventory, and increased production.
For example, an automobile manufacturer can achieve more efficiency by minimizing the storage of inventory and reducing worker movement on the assembly line.
The Kaizen team includes members from all sections of the company — be it managers, operators, other staff members. They come together to test, analyze, implement, and then standardize a new cell.
After they make all the improvements, they report it to the senior management, who then regulates the new cell.
3. Organize Value Streams
A business typically controls management through function or process. That means managers have ownership of specific steps of the process, but nobody is entirely accountable for the entire value stream.
To change this, the lean methodology requires a leader who has a deep understanding of the processes and products. That leader would be responsible for creating value for the customer and also be accountable to them.
In their book “Learning to See,” M.Rother and J.Shook, two prominent researchers and experts in the lean field, have devised a powerful technique to map the value stream, which ensures the rectification of wastes and enables process improvement. You can also refer to this map as a sample:
4. Continuous Workflow
The lean methodology identifies any process that consumes resources but brings no value as waste. Hence, it is crucial to make sure that the project moves ahead without blockages, interruptions, or waiting time.
Here are a few points that can help you identify whether a process is generating waste or not:
Unwanted steps or processes
Delays or longer wait time
Idle inventory
Overproduction
Long-distance transportation
Excessive movement of the staff
Underutilization of resources, knowledge or skills
Continuous interruptions or defects in the process
All in all, it is essential to achieve a continuous workflow in the project by eliminating waste activities from the process.
Lean has defined seven types of wastes, including:
Inventory — Avoid inventory waste by overstocking or ordering the stock too early.
Waiting — Project movement can get severely affected due to the wait time caused by approval delays and late delivery of components.
Defects — Defects not only delay the delivery time but also waste precious raw material, working hours, technology, and other resources.
Overproduction — Overproduction triggers all other types of wastes.
Motion — To avoid motion, organizations need to create a process where workers are required to move minimally to execute their daily tasks. Motion waste is generally caused due to the search for information or the lack of data access.
Transportation — Transportation is a sheer waste if the movement of a resource is not generating any kind of value. It is caused due to interruptions, task switching, and unnecessary outsourcing, among others.
Over Processing — Double work or the work done beyond the requirement due to multiple approval and excessive reviews reduces the speed of the project.
Elimination of these waste sources is crucial to ensure the flow of greater value through the project. To ensure a continuous workflow, you are also required to resolve bottlenecks in the system caused due to the shortage of workforce capacity.
The efficient mapping of the value stream and visualization of the workflow is critical to resolve bottleneck processes and make the system stable and efficient. The steady process will ensure predictable output and help managers decide the production time of orders.
Why is lean management so popular and efficient?
After the 1973 energy crisis, Toyota was the only company that was able to survive thanks to an efficient methodology.
The automobile manufacturer deployed the culture of empowering employees. Toyota employees were continuously encouraged to make the work process more efficient. All this led to a reduction in manufacturing lead-time and costs while improving quality and customer satisfaction.
Womack, J. P., Jones, D. T. & Roos, D. introduced the business methodology of lean production to the world.
This study was greatly inspired by the production philosophy of Toyota that is focused on improving productivity.
The main points of this philosophy are:
Efficient instructions must be given at the beginning of the production
Assembly must have all the required parts and tools
Inventory should not have more parts than the number required by assembly line
The success story of the Toyota car production line was also all about the elimination of waste and encouraged other business leaders to adopt lean-approach.
Wrapping-Up
Compared to mass production, lean manufacturing uses fewer resources. It allows businesses to reduce the manufacturing floor space, human efforts, investment in equipment, and engineering hours.
Aside from this, the lean approach allows the business to keep a lean inventory that is instantly used for manufacturing.
In today’s challenging time, it has become imperative for business owners to consider their business as a value stream. And you need to make sure that the value of the business is defined from the customer’s point of view.
Lean project management can improve team efficiency and enhance the productivity of the business significantly. To control costs and become efficient, project managers need to cut waste and optimize their production line further.
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Jasmine Williams covers the good and the bad of today’s business and marketing. When she’s not being all serious and busy, she’s usually hunched over a book or dancing in the kitchen, trying hard to maintain rhythm, and delivering some fine cooking (her family says so). Contact her @JazzyWilliams88
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