What is Lean process improvement?

Lean work seeks to eliminate all waste from processes, leaving activities that add value to the customer. The iterative process of continuous improvement in lean process improvement keeps a team ‘lean’.

Learn what Lean process improvement is, understand how such techniques benefit different industries, and explore how to implement these strategies in your business domain (eg, engineering, IT, knowledge work).

This isn’t a ‘Big Bang’ sort of approach: getting it right helps propel continual initiative and further development of projects, but the whole enterprise tries to engage the discipline as a way of creating a sustainable way of delivering for greater value for customers. This is a discipline of action that scales best when the whole enterprise follows it.

Benefits of Lean process improvement

What’s important is that Lean process improvement ensures that only ‘value-adding’ tasks are being performed by those groups; Lean saves a company time and (most of the time) money by allowing value-adding tasks to be the only things that are performed. Lean process improvement aims to enable teams to systematically find ways to create more value for more customers more quickly. To do that, Lean offers a systematic, scientific approach to improving product or service delivery by incorporating continuous improvement as a part of daily work.

Lean process improvement has the following advantages:

• More efficiency: if you analyse the process and run it optimally, the resulting sprint can more accurately estimate when a task will be completed and what its deliverables will be.
• Improving collaboration: Reflects continuous collaboration across the company, and facilitates the communication of issues or opportunities to improve processes between teams.
• Better morale: Streamlined and stable processes give your team more wins, improving morale.
• Less waste: Teams only work on necessary tasks, reducing wasted time.
• Growth Mindset: Lean Management encourages everyone to constantly look for improvements.
• Satisfied customers: When a company consistently delivers value, customers become advocates of its products.
• Ability to Stay Relevant: The ability to reprioritize and adapt prevents stagnation.

It’s most effective when practiced across the organisation

Lean process improvement also can’t succeed if not every part of the organisation is ‘putty in the hands’ of the process improvement cadre – or, even worse, leaves feeling depleted and disheartened.

Otherwise, organisations risk building teams comprised of individuals who by optimising their own performance, sub-optimise the performance of a second team, and consequently the performance of the overall organisation.

For instance, if your marketing team gets good at continuously improving… but in doing so they refuse to take on any non-marketing work requests so that they focus on delivering the campaign for ‘Version 6A7’… then they risk creating campaigns that do not capture ‘Version 6A7’-style messaging, or that do not dovetail with the messaging that sales have going out to the customer. This creates a strategic industrial vibration that the customer can feel. Running continuous improvement on the island of ‘our process’ makes it difficult to ‘optimise the whole’ (a key Lean principle).

Popular Lean Methods for Process Optimisation

Lean provides a number of proven approaches to help you along the way. The following are some techniques you can try out – either by themselves or in combination.

Hoshin Kanri  

Hoshin Kanri is a lean process improvement method for strategic planning. It can be seen as the lean version of PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act), but it is especially important for communicating strategy throughout the entire organisation. The approach consists of 7 steps:

• Establish organisational vision;
• Develop breakthrough objectives;
• Develop annual objectives;
• Deploy annual objectives;
• Implement annual objectives;
• Perform a monthly review;
• Perform an annual review.

5S Method  

The 5S is an order-crafting and maintenance method for your workplace. You can easily add it to your Lean process improvement plan because it is so simple. 5S stands for:

1. Sort;
2. Set order;
3. Shine;
4. Standardize;
5. Sustain.

These five practices together can help you maintain your workplace as a shrine of productivity and eliminate process wastes such as redundant movement and queuing. 5S is the darling of the manufacturing world, and for good reason. But it can find its way into knowledge-work too.

5 Whys  

The 5 Whys is one of the most effective continuous improvement tools when it comes to root cause analysis in the Lean management arsenal. The reason is simple: if you want to either troubleshoot a problem or improve a good idea, all you have to do is ask the simple question ‘why?’ five times. And we’re not kidding. We use the 5 Whys for almost everything we do.

Gemba Walk

The Gemba Walk practice essentially just takes a lean manager out of their office and puts them in the work, with three core steps.

1. Going around the workplace and seeing how the team works (without doing a formal inspection);
2. Communicating with the team and asking for any problems that they might have spotted;
3. Respecting people’s opinions and expertise.

The purpose of going on a Gemba is to observe the actual work process, engage with employees, and explore opportunities for process improvement.

When you go on a Gemba, you visit the place where the work is done, talk to employees and see where they can identify better ways to run the process.

Develop a Continuous Improvement Mindset with a Lean Process

In order to stay ahead or maybe just keep up with your competition, you need to continuously improve the quality of your process. Lean provides a number of tools – starting at the strategic level all the way down to daily team level tasks – that can help you do this.

Remember there is no rush to implement, take your time, research each lean process improvement method thoroughly, but together, or individually, they should help you attain a harmonious internal environment which enables you to be brilliant at delivering value to your customer faster than ever before.

Are you looking for fresh ideas on how to run your projects and improve your business processes? Do you have the courage to be one of those crazy, process-obsessed leaders we keep trying to help? If so, we can create a tailored training session for you and your team.