Originating from manufacturing, Lean is a management philosophy that focuses on minimising operational waste, improving efficiency, and maximising value.
Bloated processes, large hand-offs, or juggling multiple work... There are tons of ingredients for a wasteful recipe. These systemic shortcomings manifest themselves as project delays, quality issues, and unimpressed customers.
Don't let Lean's manufacturing roots make you think it only works for assembly lines.
Factory work turns raw materials into finished products, office work turns information and insights into strategy that underpins the tactical work.
In both settings, employees and equipment undertake a set of activities, and aim to create outcomes that customers are willing to pay for.
The Key Difference?
Knowledge work doesn't pile up in a warehouse. It is often less visible, or not visible at all. Establishing transparency is the ultimate first step to zero in on Lean, which is a whole different topic.
For the sake of this article, assuming that there is sufficient transparency and diving into how Lean principles can be applied in knowledge work.
Value-add activities (VA)Â contribute to customer value, create willingness to pay.
Non-value-add activities (NVA) don't directly translate to customer value but they are necessary.
Waste can be;
đź’ˇ Tip: TIMÂ WOODSÂ or DOWNTIME mnemonics are helpful in categorising waste, with some adjustments for knowledge work.
Knowing what's valuable brings us to the next principle - mapping the value stream. How does the value flow?
What are my system boundaries?
There are often multiple value-streams in an organisation. Therefore, identifying the system boundaries is a good start as trying to fit all the activities in a single VSM (Value Stream Map) is overwhelming, if not impossible.
Boundaries of a system can be idea-to-market, quote-to-cash, or any defined start and end point that encompasses a complete process.
đź’ˇ Tip: Involve leaders and senior managers in a collective mapping session, rather than doing stakeholder interviews separately and trying to connect the dots later. Virtual whiteboards such as Miro, Mural, or LucidSpark offer great workshop experiences for distributed teams.
VSM can be considered as organisational X-ray. It surfaces information such as;
VSM should be treated as a living document. There should be a future-state VSM that keeps evolving through continuous inspection and adaptation.
đź’ˇ Tip: DMAICÂ (Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control) or PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) can bring structure for continuously improving towards a future-state map.
Organisations often focus on maximising resource utilisation. But everyone being 100% utilised generates waste, unless it's the bottleneck.
A system can't go faster than its bottleneck.
When all the resources in a system are fully utilised, upstream work piles up while downstream steps starve it.
Little's Law and Theory of Constraints (ToC) provide great foundations for having a better grasp of flow and system constraints.
To avoid massive piles of work at the bottleneck, it's crucial to pay attention to it.
To make a pull-based system efficient, bottleneck should never be overloaded.
Drum-Buffer-Rope (DBR) by Eliyahu Goldratt puts this into perspective by depicting the bottleneck as a drum that sets the pace of a system. Drum pulls the rope to bring more work into the system only when it has capacity to do so, minimising quality issues, and reducing lead time.
When collaboration across departments is limited and goals are not interconnected, work accumulates and poses risks. e.g. work becoming obsolete, backlog outgrowing the capacity, and SLAs being breached etc.
Relentlessly looking for the next set of improvements, and continuously tightening the nuts and bolts of the organisation create a compounding effect of benefits.
Here's the fact; improving something 1% every day for a year makes it 37 times better.
đź’ˇ Tip: Data visualisation tools (e.g. PowerBI, Atlassian Analytics, Tableau, etc.) give insights into operational data, making improvement measurable.
Lean principles help see value through waste, leading to significant opportunities for both operational and financial gains. It isn't just for manufacturing, it’s a universal approach to doing more with less by focusing on what matters and removing what doesn’t.
Whether you’re managing a project, improving a service, or leading a team, Lean principles offer a proven path to sustainable efficiency.
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