3 Types of Waste & 5 Core Principles of Lean Project Management

Your vision is to get the maximum value while having minimal waste in all of the projects in your business. Ideally, you would be “Lean.”

You’ve heard the term lean when it comes to manufacturing but what does that even mean? The basic idea is that the focus is to minimize or eliminate waste under this mindset while providing the maximum value. You may think of waste as something visual like in a trash can when there is too much scrap metal or material leftover, there are too many boxes or too much paper. However, waste can be much more than just what you see as it can be labor hours or anything that a customer wouldn’t pay you for. If your customer doesn’t find value in what is being done, that is a waste and the Lean concept focuses on eliminating that. Your customer has to want everything you are selling them, or they won’t pay for it.

The background of Lean

To get a full detailed history on Lean, this article is a good read. Essentially, this concept came from Toyota in the 1950s, and then it was used in the 1970s during the energy crisis. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the term “Lean” was used. Today, this is a widely used concept and worth some of your time to think about how you can incorporate this into your everyday projects and process. The following sections discuss the major takeaways of Lean.

There are three types of waste, known as the 3M:

1. Muda, or tasks that use resources without providing additional value.
2. Muri, or overusing equipment or employees.
3. Mura, or unevenness that lowers efficiency and productivity over a long period of time.

To break it down further, here are seven common examples of waste:

1. Overproducing
2. Waiting around
3. Overprocessing
4. Too much inventory
5. Too much transportation of goods
6. Defects and poor quality
7. Too many steps in the project or manufacturing

These waste examples can of course be found in manufacturing, but also in the service industry. Let's say you are a cleaning service. You could easily have waste in the 3M and not realize. Do you have employees waiting around for the next job due to inefficient scheduling and cancellations? Along those lines, you may have too much driving around if your routes aren't planned in a logical order. If you have some employees with high complaints or defects, you are then sending employees back to rework and the poor quality is going to show on reviews. Finally, you may have too many steps involved in cleaning. When you send a team of two, are they working in a logical way that avoids standing around and duplication of work?

The Five Core Principles of Lean

In order to incorporate these into your project, you have to determine your MVP, or Minimum Viable Product. This would be the minimum you need to have for your customers to purchase. You can go back to your customer stories to help determine all of the features and what’s necessary to move forward.

Lean Principle 1: Understand the value

Know precisely what the value is of your project in terms of the customer. What value is this to them? Make sure you include what they need in the project and not just what they asked for. How is this going to solve their problems? If you’re working directly with a customer, make sure communication is open along the way. Good communication is key, however, whether this is an internal or external project.

Lean Principle 2: Map the value stream

Lay out the process needed to create the product or service. Look at each step and determine where the waste is. Look for those seven common examples of waste noted above. The result should look like a flow chart, or the Kanban-style is often used.

Lean Principle 3: Ensure the value stream flows

Think about what the improvement plan will look like to have a future state for the project. The idea here is a plan that eliminates the waste going forward. Additionally, you should be able to determine where the bottlenecks or roadblocks are to eliminate.

Lean Principle 4: Employ a pull approach

This means working on the project when requested by the customer rather than a push strategy, where you are putting the product in front of the customer when they may not quite need it so you are saving resources and not getting stuck with inventory.

Lean Principle 5: Pursue continuous improvement

Make sure you review the process regularly to eliminate waste, and you are working as productively and efficiently as possible. This is listed as step five, but in all of these steps, this should be happening.

PDCA to assist with making this change in mindset

The next time you have a project or new product to develop, try using the Lean approach. This isn’t something that will happen instantly, but you can start by getting your team thinking in this mindset. One tool to assist with this is PDCA or the Plan, Do, Check, Act developed by Walter Shewhart, and later turned into this model by William Deming. This is a continuous cycle process used to help make a change.

Plan by making sure you know the core problem to solve, resources needed and resources you have, the best solution with those resources, and what it means to be a success.

Do by taking action and know that you may run into unexpected issues. This can be an excellent item to try out on a small-scale, nonurgent project first.

Check by thinking of this step as an audit to see if the plan worked and identify what went wrong.

Act by proceeding with applying your plan. The goal is to iterate and use this to find and test solutions along the way.

Start with the PDCA, find all the areas you can cut waste, and comment on how it went!

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Written by Nicole Hullihen, August 22nd, 2021

References recommended to learn more about Lean.

Coolman, A. (2014, Aug 6). Startups Should Lean on Lean Project Management. Wrike. https://www.wrike.com/blog/startups-should-lean-on-lean-project-management/

Ey, K. (2017, Jun 23). The Definitive Guide to Lean Project Management. Smartsheet. https://www.smartsheet.com/guide-to-lean-project-management

Kanbanize. (n.d). Your Guide to Lean Project Management. Kanbanize. https://kanbanize.com/lean-project-management.

Kanbanize. (n.d). What is Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) Cycle? https://kanbanize.com/lean-management/improvement/what-is-pdca-cycle.

Wrike. (n.d.). Project Management Guide FAQ. Wrike. https://www.wrike.com/project-management-guide/faq/what-is-lean-project-management/