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Lean Thinking

This article is the first one in the series to talk about Lean and Lean thinking and how we can use it with our teams and organisation.


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Rohit Ratan Mani

2 years ago | 2 min read

It is a term coined by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones to capture the essence of Toyota Production System (TPS).

Lean thinking (LT) is a way of thinking to about activities, that generate value, and visualising the waste that is created in the process of generating value. LT builds a culture which focuses on eliminating waste and aligning customer satisfaction with customer satisfaction.

LT supports continuous learning and improvement in the workplace. LT at its core puts people first and b elieves in building autonomy with a purpose.

LT talks about five principles:

1)     Value - Value is defined from the perspective of the customer who uses the product or service.

2)     Value Streams - The Value Stream is a sequence of all the steps to create a product or service that provides value to the customer. The activities in a Value Stream can be classified as:        

a)      Value-Added: activities that add value to the product or service from the point of view of the customer. E.g: Writing unit test cases as you build quality in the product adds value.

b)     Non value-added: activities that don’t add value to the product or services from the point of the customer. These activities consume effort and resources. E.g.: waiting for approval.

Lean regards these activities as Waste or Muda.

3)      Flow - Visualising Flow helps in managing customer demands with right amount of inventory. Once the Flow of work is visible, teams can identify non-value added activities, manage batch sizes (single piece flow), avoid rework, reduce inventory (ready work for developers, ready work to released, etc.) and reduce processing time.

4)     Pull - The Pull model of working builds up on “Just-In-Time” (JIT) concept. The concept of JIT means producing a product or providing a service when the customer has ordered it. It helps in moving away from “just-in-case” model where are organisations are overproducing in anticipation of demands and resulting in attempt to push sales.

A pull system in a product team helps in flow of work from backlog to release in a streamline way.

5)     Perfection - Perfection is a pursuit to continuously strive and improve things together one step at a time. LT supports the spirit of Kaizen in every team members. Kaizen means change for better.

How are you demonstrating a Lean Thinking? Let us know in the comments.

In the next blog we will talk about Lean Thinking practices.







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Rohit Ratan Mani

I am a life coach working as an Agile Coach supporting individual, teams and organisation in transforming.


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