What is Lean process improvement?

The ‘lean’ in continuous lean process improvement is all about getting rid of waste to make sure that the team’s work only creates value for the paying customer. It’s about going in circles because the team always wants to make the process leaner and leaner.

This is definitely not a one-off. Doing this right will help sustain the pace and further refinement of projects. The core mission is to develop a system to deliver customer value faster. This is a long-term practice, and if the entire company can use this practice, it will work best.

Benefits of Lean process improvement

With lean process improvement, team members work only on activities that provide value to the customer – this spares both the company’s resources and money.

Lean process improvement has the following advantages:

•  Improved efficiency: Once you’ve broken down your process into elements, you can identify weak links or ways to improve your workflow going forward. Once you start estimating deadlines and deliverables in sprints, this will improve in each turn.
• Better collaboration: companies improve continuously, which encourages cross-pollination. Teams learn to communicate problems or opportunities to improve processes.
• 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 reprioritise and adapt prevents stagnation.

How to apply Lean process improvement to projects

Here’s how to integrate it into your business in four simple steps:

1. Identify potential areas for improvement

In your next team meeting, do a gut check on your process: what are the areas where process just isn’t doing what your team needs it to do, and thus deserves to be challenged?

2. Identification of potential solutions

Once those areas for improvement are identified, open up creativity by challenging members of the team to brainstorm possible solutions. Those solutions are often right at their fingertips, based on their years of experience, and are the product of what neuroscientists call ‘embodied cognition’. Embodied cognition is essentially ‘thinking with your hands’ – you cannot learn it any other way, because your mind needs your body in order to conceive the things you are thinking about. Once rare examples of innovation, this approach is now common in corporate programs. It works almost invariably by challenging the status quo: that it’s how we’ve always done it, so why should we change?

3. Implement improvements

Sometimes it takes work to implement changes. When new practices are introduced, there may be a little pushback.  However, preparing for new projects and collaborating with your team will make the process easier.

4. Monitor results

However, simply putting solutions into p

Practice is not the end of the process. It’s also important to monitor performance; to collect indicators to ascertain whether the solutions have improved the situation; to find out why they worked (or didn’t).

5. Value process improvement.

Much of the lean process comes from continuous improvement, a concept aimed at continually improving the company processes to adapt as strategies change.

After every process improvement intervention, project teams should confirm that each of the constituent tasks forms a logical chain – that each step in a workflow contributes directly to the value a product or service provides to customers. If a recent improvement initiative does not seem to provide value to customer needs, it should be re-worked or scrapped.