Teamwork is great … when it’s great. And many times it is not.

I want to present a topic that can enable this to happen and strengthen both teams in training and teams already established.

This is Lean, an American interpretation of the TPS (Toyota Production System) of Taiichi Ohno, who was originally from Japan. It is also closely related to William Edwards Deming’s Total Quality concept and, in my view, complements very well with so-called “Agile Methodologies” such as Scrum, Kanban, XP and Crystal Clear.

Lean means light, lean (fat-free) and aims at gradual and continuous improvement of teams based on analysis and disciplined work on its members, processes, work environment and context.

The seven “Lean principles” are as follows:
– Eliminate waste.
– React as fast as possible.
– Extend learning.
– Decide as late as possible.
– Empower the team.
– See the set.
– Create integrity.

Each of the principles provides a key piece in the holistic puzzle that runs through this concept, which, besides pointing to the optimization of systems composed by processes and machines, has a human side without which would not be writing these lines.

With regard to the elimination of waste, it is proposed to analyze the whole value chain to identify different possible causes of waste. It is considered wastage of queues, waiting, work started and not finished and some other situations more. It is everything that DOES NOT add value.

With respect to rapid reaction, it aims at the flexibility and availability of both people, knowledge and material resources to result in the solution of orders coming from a customer. We all want to be able to respond quickly to orders. We must define what is “quick” for us, measure our real times and drive in the improvement and sustainability of those times. It is not more than that. And it is no less than that.

With regard to expanding learning, reference is made to continuous learning, generated from reflection on mistakes, training to continue to specialize the skills needed to operate correctly and with high quality and disseminate knowledge that are centralized, which are often sources of various problems.

The most controversial of Lean principles is, in my view, that of deciding as late as possible. If I add that this is about defining the last moment responsible and acting before that moment and with all the information that can be gathered for that instant, then it is no longer so controversial. But it is a necessary clarification. Deciding well-informed is key.

Empowering the team is nothing more than seeing that team as something more than the sum of their individualities, to understand how the members complement each other and what risks are run with the distribution of knowledge and personal skills. It’s also about trusting the team and giving you what you need to do the tasks you need to solve. Autonomy is something desired in the Lean context. Teams that decide for themselves, taking into account their context. It seems easy to understand. In practice, it is very challenging.

To see the whole is to broaden the personal point of view and try to see everything. Not just an activity, not just a process, not just a team, not just our business, not just the consumer, not just the competition, not just the market, not just that. All that and more. It involves activating all the observation capabilities that we can activate. To understand what impacts are the decisions we make and the actions we carry out. And also those that we do not carry forward. It is the principle that I find most difficult to put into practice. This can serve, among other benefits, not to maximize local metrics that are detrimental to global metrics. That is, supposed specific optimizations that de-optimize the system.

Creating integrity has to do with carrying forward those actions that, once we see the whole, we see that we can realize. It is the counterpart of the previous principle. One invites us to observe and the other to act. It is not one without the other. Similarly it happens with the principles of reacting fast and deciding late. Curiously, integrity is also created by applying each of the other Lean principles.

I hope that this explanation I share about the 7 Lean principles is useful and that it helps their concrete application in real work teams.

To begin to apply this, I share the names of two specific techniques: Kanban boards to visualize activities and updated state of processes and Value Stream Mapping for the analysis of them.

I await feedback and opinions. I think we all need # Feedback, so we’re welcome

7 Principles Lean to enhance equipment and optimize processes

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