What is Lean and What’s it All About?

Lean Management and the use of it in the IT field. I am going to focus on the “Lean Enterprise” aspect of Lean as well as pros and cons and a brief history of Lean used today.

The word Lean was coined in the early 1990s by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers. According to them, “ Lean production is aimed at the elimination of waste in every area of production including customer relations, product design, supplier networks and factory management. Its goal is to incorporate less human effort, less inventory, less time to develop products, and less space to become highly responsive to customer demand while producing top quality products in the most efficient and economical manner possible”. Lean Enterprise constitutes the entire supply chain or value stream. If an organization strives to become a Lean Enterprise it needs equal participation from all the departments (ALL TEAMS) and from all the levels including the upper management, development, project planning, QA departments and everyone involved in the project. The interesting thing is going to be how do I use Lean in the technology field when it has been so prominent and prevalent in the manufacturing side of the business. Together we will see if we can figure this out, this should be an interesting journey.

Features of a Lean Enterprise

1. No waiting time

2. No stocks

3. Reduction in the processing time

4. Line balancing

5. Use of pull system instead of the usual push

#leanmanagement #agile #scrummaster