Lean thinking is based on eliminating waste in order to improve efficiency. Lean project management relies on lean thinking concepts for the elimination of waste. Due to its inception in the quality and productivity improvement processes in Japanese manufacturing, especially the Toyota Production System, the three main categories of waste (3M) have Japanese names: muda, mura and muri .
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Muda - any activity that consumes resources but creates no value for the customer
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Mura - Unevenness or fluctuation in process and production
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Muri - overburdening resources like equipment or people
Each of these categories of waste have several sub-categories. e.g. Muda talks about seven sub-categories of waste. I’ve adapted the examples to the software / IT sector.
- Defects and rework - obvious wastes which are problems of quality in deliverables.
- Inventory - lean processes employ just-in-time (JIT) approach to minimize inventory, e.g. ready-to-develop user stories
- Waiting - agile methods mandate cross-functional teams in order to minimize waiting. Kanban boards implement limits of “work in progress” for the same reason
- Overproduction - “busy work” like excess unproductive meetings, or piling on unregulated demand
- Overprocessing - another hidden waste, e.g. a developer gold-plating with unnecessary features, this could be reduced with proper backlog ranking.
- Excess Motion - mini-movement (not to be confused with longer distances in transportation) of resources, e.g. excessive back-and-forth discussion on email or other asynchronous methods of communication.
- Transportation - large distance movement of resources involving risks of damage. In the software field this could be repeated manual deployment / movement of code across environments.