This blog is about the summary of Lean Primer by Craig Larman and Bas Bodde who they are authors of Scaling Lean & Agile Development.
Lean thinking is Toyota way. The English term ‘lean’ was popularized for the Toyota system—by MIT researchers of Toyota in The Machine That Changed the World to contrast their lean production with the alternative of mass production.
The followings are what Lean Thinking is about in summary:
- Sustainable shortest lead time, best quality and value (to people and society), most customer delight, lowest cost, high morale, safe
- Respect for People in the following ways: don’t trouble your “customer!, “develop people, then build products”, no wasteful work, teams & individuals evolve their own practices and improvements, build partners with stable relationships, trust, and coaching in lean thinking, develop teams
- Product Development: long-term great engineers, mentoring from manager- engineer- teacher, cadence, cross-functional, team room + visual mgmt, entrepreneurial chief engineer/product mgr, set-based concurrent dev, create more knowledge
- 14 Principles : long-term, flow, pull, less variability & overburden, Stop & Fix, master norms, simple visual mgmt, good tech, leader-teachers from within, develop exceptional people, help partners be lean, Go See, consensus, reflection & kaizen
- Continuous Improvement: Go See, kaizen, spread knowledge, small, relentless, retrospectives, 5 Whys, eyes for waste, perfection challenge, work toward flow
- Management applies and teaches lean thinking, and bases decisions on this long-term philosophy
The following image can give a better understanding of what is Lean Thinking and the most important aspect of it is based upon having a good foundation.
When new people start, they should learn problem solving through hands-on improvement experiments, learn to see how lean thinking applies in different domains. Managers should Go See means people meaning that they should go see with their own eyes what is happening at work. Managers are expected to be hands-on masters of their domain of work meaning that every employee believes that my manager can do my job better than me and in that way they do practice lean thinking and coach other people.
Pillar one is Respect for people, this sounds nebulous, but includes concrete actions and culture within Toyota.
They broadly reflect respect for and sensitivity to morale, not making people do wasteful work, real teamwork, mentoring to develop skillful people, humanizing the work and environment, safe and clean environment (inside and outside of Toyota), and Philosophical integrity among the management team.
Pillar two is Continuous Improvement which is based on several ideas: Go See, Kaizen, Perfection Challenge, Work toward flow
And as I mentioned before meaning Go See is a principle to Go to the source to find the facts to make correct decisions, build consensus and achieve goals at our best speed. In a lean thinking culture, all people, especially managers including senior managers should not spend all their time in separate offices or meeting rooms, receiving information via reports, computers, management reporting tools, and status meetings. Rather, to know what is going on and help improve. Kaizen translated as simply “continuous improvement”. Five Whys or 5 Whys is a simple and widely used tool used in Kaizen. It helps develop problem solving and root cause analysis skills. Perfection Challenge is the third important element in continuous improvement inLean.
Rather than the two pillars , there are 14 main principles:
1. Base management decisions on a long-term philosophy, even at the expense of short-term financial goals.
2. Move toward flow; move to ever-smaller batch sizes and cycle times to deliver value fast & expose weakness.
3. Use pull systems; decide as late as possible
4. Level the work—reduce variability and overburden to remove unevenness.
5. Build a culture of stopping and fixing problems; teach everyone to methodically study problems.
6. Master norms (practices) to enable kaizen and employee empowerment.
7. Use simple visual management to reveal problems and coordinate.
8. Use only well-tested technology that serves your people and process.
9. Grow leaders from within who thoroughly understand the work, live the philosophy, and teach it to others.
10. Develop exceptional people and teams who follow your company’s philosophy.
11. Respect your extended network of partners by challenging them to grow and helping them improve.
12. Go see for yourself at the real place of work to really understand the situation and help.
13. Make decisions slowly by consensus, thoroughly considering options; implement rapidly.
14. Become and sustain a learning organization through relentless reflection and kaizen.
And the Lean Product Development (LPD) focuses on creating more useful knowledge and learning better than the competition.
Lower-cost information that focus on large-scale test automation, frequent or continuous integration, focus on mentoring from experts and spreading knowledge.
In conclusion, as you investigate lean thinking, it is easy to see that it is a broad system that spans all groups and functions of the enterprise, including product development, sales, production, service, and HR. Lean applies to the enterprise.
Lean thinking is much more than tools such as visual management or queue management,or merely elimination of waste.
I believe the right process and good thinking will create the right results and by looking at the world and what is happening to our industry those are the masters who know their field and can practice it. Only leaders will grow who understand the scope of their work and underlying challenges and live the philosophy and teach it to the others. Those are successful who extend their partners and at the same time challenge them and help them to improve.
My thinking around this article and lean thinking is it is very thorough and methodical. Of course in real practice is must be very difficult however as we can see the result of practicing it is perfection as we can see in Toyota production.