The Lean World

Lean originated in the 1920’s with Henry Ford famous T model where the cars went through a continuous flow until they were completed. In the 1990, Womack, Jones and Roos with their book on « The Machine that Changed the World » brought to us the Toyota Production System, where we discovered that in the 1930s Ohno, a brilliant engineer came with great ideas, such as Single Minute Exchange of Die (SMED), 5S (Seiri,Seiton, Seiso, Seikutsu, Shisuke), Kanban, review their relationships with suppliers and integrate dealers in their system, allowing them to move to build-to-order. This is the emergence of Lean. The goal is to bring value to the customer through the elimination of wastes, quality improvements and through the continuous flow of products until they are delivered to the customer.

Dr Deming, with his Total Quality System was a great driving force for the Japanese economic rise after the second World War. HIs book « Out of Crisis » described how his philosophy led to the transformation of the organization and improvement of overall productivity. Sig Sigma was later developed by an engineer at Motorola where it was used to improve the processes. That was the evoliution of Lean !

Today the lean thinking is extended and adapted beyond manufacturing industries to englobe also Services, IT companies and Software Development. One of the tool of Lean that is today applied in development operations is Kanban. We design only what is required by the customer and nothing more that would not add value to the product. We use Scrum and Scaled Scrum to embrace manageable teams size and wherever they are on the planet. Short sprints allow us to deliver a « shippable » product within short production run. If the quality is impacted by detection of bugs then we are able to resolve them quickly before proceeding with our production in order to deliver a product as agreed with the stakeholders. Quality should be defined with your customer in the form of acceptance criteria and that should be communicated to all those involved in developing the product. If a priority change in your production planning, the run is not stopped since it is already a short run and you don’t want to destabilise your production planning and team as you are already lean but we change the planning order, called product Backlog. Applying Lean in your process and PRINCE 2 to manage your software development project will bring added value. But, above all we need organisational culture change to bring about an impact. A piece meal approach to Lean will only be deceptive and will not benefit those organisations.

The Lean concept is very powerful and companies can only reap the benefit if they apply the the philosophy all throughout the process flow. There are 2 great books by Dr Goldratt which I love and the concept is applicable in any organisations. I would recommend The Goal and the other one is The Race. Enjoy the reading and thanks for sharing your ideas.