What Are The 5 Lean Management Principles?

1. Identify Value

To lay the foundations of a Lean process, you need to first identify the team’s work value. You need to distinguish the value-adding from waste activities. It is crucial for everybody to be on the same page about it, so this should be a collective activity. 

To understand what value is, consider the end product of your efforts and what your customer gets from it. By definition, value is everything that your customer is paying you for. However, some teams are not producing a direct value for the company’s customer but are enhancing the overall value that the organization delivers.

In this case, the customer is your company. For example, the value of a quality assurance team’s work is the number of bugs they catch and therefore ensure that the whole company will deliver a product of value to the end-user. 

Lean identifies 7 types of waste. Waste activities can be categorized as pure and necessary. The main difference between them is that some waste activities are necessary to support the value-adding ones while pure waste activities only bring harm to the Lean flow of work. 

2. Map Value Stream

The second of the 5 principles of Lean is all about the stream of value. That’s why, after you’ve identified the value that your team produces, it is important to visualize its path to the customer. In Lean management, this is usually done with the help of Kanban boards.The Kanban board is a tool for mapping every step of your process and, therefore, visualizing your team’s value stream. The basic Kanban board is a vertical flat surface divided by columns for the three primary states of any assignment:

• Requested
• In progress
• Done

Although visualizing your workflow this way is a good start, you should consider mapping your process more precisely by including the steps that compose each stage. For example, a “Requested” stage may have two steps – order received and ready to start. Usually, “In progress” consists of the greatest number of steps.

When mapping your value stream for the first time, you should focus on value-adding steps to create a Lean process. Be sure to correct it occasionally as your process evolves.

3. Create Flow

In the world of Lean, flow is a key concept. Since any kind of waiting is a waste, when creating a flow of value, your goal is to ensure smooth delivery from the second you receive an order to the moment when you deliver it to the customer.

A major impediment to creating a smooth flow are the bottlenecks in your process. You should be watchful of how tasks progress through your workflow. Keep an especially close eye on where tasks get stuck so you can look to understand why that happens. Bottlenecks may be caused by lack of capacity at a certain stage, waiting on external stakeholders, etc.

Among the most common bottlenecks in any process are the review stages because most of the time, the people reviewing work items are fewer than those that submit it, and often, the reviewers become overwhelmed.

Alleviating the bottlenecks in your process is crucial for the creation of a smooth and Lean flow. If you can’t alleviate bottlenecks, at least be sure to protect any existing ones from getting clogged.

A simple way to do it is to limit the amount of work that your team can have in progress simultaneously. Having this in mind, you should have a discussion with your team on the topic and agree on acceptable WIP limits to help them achieve maximum efficiency.

Ensure that they understand how harmful multitasking can be to their productivity and experiment with different limits until you achieve a smooth flow of tasks.

After you have created a flow of work, the 4th of the Lean principles asks us to establish a pull system. The idea is simple, start new work only when there is a demand for it and your team has spare capacity. Your goal should be to produce the value that is actually needed by your customers and avoid overproduction.

To visualize it clearly, let’s look at how assignments are processed in a pull system versus the typical push model.

In a push system, a task is created and then assigned to a developer. Someone, usually some kind of manager or team leader, takes the units of work that need to be done and then allocates them to the team members. Simply, work is pushed onto the people who will be doing it.

In a pull system, the tasks that must be processed are stored in a queue. A developer who is currently not working on anything will go to the queue and take the item with the highest priority that they are able to work on. The people who are doing the work pull the assignments and start processing them.

As a Lean organization, your goal is to deliver value to your customers in the most efficient manner. A good way to ensure that is focusing on two key metrics of each task:

• Cycle time
• Throughput

The cycle time of your tasks is the time your team is actively working towards their completion, while throughput is the number of tasks that you finish in a predefined time frame.

As a leader looking to implement the 5 Lean principles and Lean practices, you should aim for shorter cycle times resulting in an increased throughput of your team.

5. Seek Constant Improvement

This Lean principle is closely related to the concept of continuous improvement, which is an integral part of Lean management.

Your goal is to constantly improve every process in your team by focusing on enhancing the activities that generate the most value for your customer while removing as many waste activities as possible.

Continuous improvement can be achieved with the help of methods such as Plan-Do-Check-Act, known as PDCA but is more of a mindset that you have to inspire in your team. To help your team achieve continuous improvement, you should consider the way you lead them.

If you are among the traditional managers that prefer to be in control of every single activity and micromanage even the execution of small tasks, you may have to embrace a change to your style and implement a shared leadership model.

Continuous improvement can only blossom if every person on your team takes ownership of their tasks. This can prove difficult when they can’t even handle the smallest issues on their own. Place more trust in their expertise and increase their independence in time according to their performance.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should let your team members run loose. That’s why a great Lean/Agile practices to implement is the daily stand-up meeting where you can keep them accountable. There, every person explains what they’ve done during the previous day, what they intend to do today, and if there are any obstacles in their way.

Besides applying each of the 5 principles of Lean, you’ll also have the responsibility to enlighten your team and help them understand why each one of the Lean principles is important with the goal of embracing them as a culture. 

Before Implementing Lean, Prepare Your Team for the Change

• Set clear goals
• Establish a Lean mindset
• Start Small and Find a Change Agent