Muda, Mura and Muri – 3 Types of Waste in Lean Project Management

Lean project management or LPM applies Lean principles, which have been perfected by Toyota, in the realm of project management. In LPM, main objectives are: reducing waste and delivering value. Lean project managers aim to deliver projects successfully, while staying true to these values. LPM identifies 3 types of waste: Muda, Mura and Muri. What are these?

1.       Muda is the time and effort wasted on activities, that provide no value to the customer.

2.       Mura is an uneven, inconsistent production process, resulting in time and resource waste.

3.       Muri is an overuse of machines, or employees.

Application of Lean Management Practices

Application of Lean management practices means, different wastes can be easily minimized, and it also helps in making the process more efficient, value-oriented, more predictable, sustainable, and profitable. Lean project management follows Deming's Cycle of Change and seeks to deliver value to customers quickly and continuously, by limiting work in progress.

Lean process thinking centres on the need of the customer. It is the customer, who identifies value in your process, based on which you map the process value stream, and establish the pull-based flow. Throughout the project life cycle, improvement opportunities are noted and acted upon, to ensure constant process growth and optimization. Let's take a look at the five Lean principles.

Lean Project Management Principles

Our first step is to focus on value, as defined by your customer. Who is the customer? Is it the project sponsor, the c-suite, or the end-user, for which the project is being developed? Arguably, it can be either. The shareholders or c-suite executive, who expect the product to be delivered in such a way, that is profitable, sustainable, and controlled.

Our next step is to visualize the value stream.

Map out the value stream for the process, to define where it creates value for the customer. Knowing this will help you ensure maximum waste reduction, and highest value delivery. It's common for Lean project managers to aid value stream and workflow visualization with Kanban boards, to let anyone see the current project status, at any  time - thus, minimizing meetings and status reporting. 

Lean project management requires keeping tabs on throughput and cycle time values; thus project managers aim to deliver the product into the hands of customer as fast as possible. When a Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle ends, team evaluates methods of improving speed as well as reducing waste, which enables them to deliver subsequent features to the client more efficiently. 

Lean managers ensure that they have customers pulling the work, signalling their demand. They make sure that open communication exists with the customers, providing them required understanding that is needed for delivering functionality at the time when it is needed. This signifies the need to understand that the process takes time, as well as customer behaviours. Limiting work in progress is an important aspect of LPM or Lean project management.

 

The objective is to provide clients only the required items, and ensure that it is done quickly. This makes Lean projects much shorter than traditional ones, whose project buffers allocate extra time to account for risks. Lean project management uses buffers only as a way to protect a WIP constraint, or critical chain of the project - the part that takes the longest to complete.

Traditional project management conducts a Lessons Learned event at the end of a project. While it can aid in future projects, it's missing the opportunity for improvement in completed work. Lean project management seeks continuous improvement. Kaizen Blitz is a dedicated four- or five-day event, during which relevant stakeholders are gathered to determine the main cause, and an answer, to some issue, that has creeped up within the procedure - there and then.

If you're following the five Lean principles, it means you're implementing Lean project management, and your customers will likely thank you for your effort! Lean project management allows you to achieve shorter lead times, cost reduction across the board improved quality and customer satisfaction, and better process efficiency and predictability.

If you want to know more about SAFe Agilist certification cost in India, SAFe certification cost India, or SAFe Agile interview questions, then visit https://learnow.live/ .

 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Implementation Strategies for Business Epics

  SAFe is a scalable agile framework that helps organizations quickly and intelligently transform. It has been used by hundreds of organizations and teams to improve their agility, productivity, and culture over the past decade. SAFe Certification gives you the knowledge and skills needed to develop software in an Agile, Lean-based process. Business epics are key SAFe initiatives that promote the business value and cross-organizational deadlines (PI), boundaries (trains), or sometimes both. Proper analysis and categorization of the business epic to be implemented is the basic competence of an Agile company. It is simple to think about epics as binary, large, monolithic work, in fact, to reap the benefits of agility, they need to be rolled out gradually. In addition, understanding the technology, benefits, and economics makes some of them not fully valuable as the initial effort provides most of the potential value to the business. In this article, we are going to see the vario...
Read more

Critical Behaviours for Agile Leaders

  Agile is a new way of working and thinking in the digital age. Business and personal agility are very important and depend on this journey. Agility is primarily due to the personal agility of individuals in an agile organization. In this group, the personal agile leader (AL: tribe/Chapter Leaders, Executives, etc.) in the organization is "a matter of life and death" for success in agile travel. The agility of individuals is primarily influenced by the fact that they "learn" something. Here are the main behaviours we think agile leaders need to learn. 1. Be A Window And Not As A Door You want to show that you value transparency. It is not about continuous KPI monitoring and micro-management. It's about knowing when to fail, telling the truth, and giving real perception into the vision. Your teams must know why you want them to prioritize one project over the other and are more likely to contact you when they feel their contribution is growing to achieve ...
Read more

How Do You Prioritize Value Delivery in Agile?

In an agile environment, the Product Manager & Product Owner are responsible for deciding what should be delivered first, during each iteration. Their work is crucial to the success of product development. To begin to understand how organizations make priority decisions in an agile environment, we must first define the meaning of the word "value." What is Value Delivery? Value is an important aspect of the agile environment; it is the process by which value is created through the collaboration between the customer and the development team. Value delivery is the act of shipping value to the customer. It is a process that has a positive impact on the customer and the business. It is an outcome of a development cycle that contains all the following: 1. Clear definition of what constitutes value for customers 2. Specification of what must be delivered to meet those criteria 3. Design and implementation of those deliverables 4. Feedback from those who receive t...
Read more

More About Professional Certification

Loading...