In the last (ahem!) exciting episode of Winds of Change, I offered an overview and brief history of lean. This time, let's take a somewhat deeper dive. If you are familiar with the Agile Manifesto, then you already know some things about lean, because it is essentially lean for software development.
When people use "lean" as a noun, it is often misunderstood. Like "agile" as a noun, people tend to add far more constraints to the philosophy than is actually there. Many in the lean community prefer to think of it as both a philosophy and a toolkit. The philosophy guides operational thinking and the toolkit provides some specific techniques for executing.
Let's start with the philosophy. First and foremost, lean is a never-ending journey. As a consultant, I have occasionally come across firms that told me "we tried lean, but it didn't work for us." As a lean enthusiast, this sounds to me like, "we tried being good at our jobs, but it just wasn't working out." As Yoda would say, "do or do not -- there is no try."
When an organization begins a lean journey, they commit to driving out waste, or muda as it is referred to in Japanese. There are seven types of waste. Although scientists recently claimed discovery of the elusive "8th waste," it has never been verified. The included diagram will itemize each for you and I'm guessing you will understand what they mean.
The way waste is driven out of processes is through an "improvement event." This is commonly referred to as Kaizen. There are many ways to identify a Kaizen opportunity. One of the principle ways comes from a core part of the lean philosophy, which mandates that decisions be pushed down in the organization to the person or group closest to the affected process. In other words, if the problem is with scheduling, the scheduling coordinator should own the Kaizen event.
Six Sigma is a different toolbox that is often associated with lean. It was developed at General Electric and attempts to provide some more mathematical and scientific rigor to the Kaizen process. The name itself refers to the number of defects per million that a process could produce in order for it to be considered optimized.
In the manufacturing world, where these disciplines were invented, variability is something that is uniformly driven out of good processes. The reason that the agile manifesto doesn't speak of waste is because creativity can often be a wasteful effort when considered intrinsically. However, when one looks at the potential benefits produced by the sometimes meandering creative process, it becomes clear that the benefits can far outweigh the cost.
What agile shares with lean is the focus on people. Both place ultimate importance on the customer, but agree that leveraging staff by empowering people with flexibility, learning opportunities, decision-making authority, and good management leads to more oars in the waters of continuous improvement.
Whole books have been written on lean and this is not an attempt to cover the territory. However, if all you know about lean is what you've just read, you may be better off than some "experts" who try to pigeonhole the philosophy into their own mold. In part 3, we'll take apart business process management (BPM) to see if there's anything good under the hood.
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