Reducing waste in project management, Lean perspective.

One of the major aspects of project management success is to deliver results for the customer with the least possible amount of waste.

Project management firms and consultants are continuously developing methodologies to design high efficiency processes to reduce as much waste as possible. Three project management worlds are now existing in many organizations: “classical”, “agile” and “hybrid”.

However, it is no longer the approach that is the key issue, but the way in which the approach is designed and executed.

Although “Lean” principles are designed to deal with the problem of waste in fabrication environment. But it is possible to tailor it for use in project management so we can reach far in this field.

Let’s try to map lean principles to project management process buy showing waste types and how to deal with them.

Defects:

product is not fit to use, service is doesn’t add value or both doesn’t meet customer expectations this

will cause rework and customer dissatisfaction. Poor requirements gathering and poor designs will 

cause poor results. The key is to know exactly what customer needs, this can be achieved by determination and early engagement of key stakeholders in requirements collection designs approvals, in addition to choose project team with the right skills.

Waiting:

There are several sources of this kind of waste during project life cycle. Poor surveys and inaccurate prerequisites determination will cause time waste to get site ready for work. poor knowledge of customer administration conditions can cause delay in obtaining work and access permissions specially in public sectors. Delay in issues reporting causes delay in taking corrective. So, taking the previous issues into consideration in addition to well estimation of activities sequence and durations can reduce waiting time.

Transportation:

 Good planning to align delivery time with customer sites readiness shall reduce number of transitions specially if implementation going to happen in multiple sites.

Overproduction:

Here it refers to both gold plating & scope creep in project management. So, to avoid overproduction you need to accurately define scope, get customer (key stakeholders) formal approval. and stick with approved scope. Good change management is also an effective method of reducing scope creep and gold plating.

Over processing:

Spending time and effort more than what task needs is overprocessing issue this can be caused; poor team skills and poor tools quality are main factors in poor processing waste. Enhancing team skills and using high quality tools shall guarantee a continuous flow of results by limiting work in progress.

Underutilization of skills, talents, and knowledge:

It can be caused by poor management of project resources. Selecting the right project team and suitable tasks assignments, rules and responsibilities determination and good team building techniques are the key factors of achieving good utilization.