Lean Useful Project Management: A Practical Guide

In short, the answer is a resounding yes. Many teams ask whether lean useful project management really delivers, and the honest reply is that it does. Lean does not feature heavily in most project management methodologies, yet it should. Lean can, as a result, improve your team's performance by many folds.

Why lean is useful for project management

Lean is a practical mindset, and it cuts the waste that slows real delivery. Project managers often inherit bloated processes, so a leaner approach frees up time and budget. Disciplined Agile, for example, incorporates lean into its toolsets and proves the point in practice.

What is lean?

Lean has its origin in the manufacturing industry. It also pre-dates both Agile and the PMBOK Guide by a couple of decades, so its ideas are well tested. Because the core goal is to remove waste, the same thinking transfers cleanly to projects of any size.

What are the lean principles?

The 8 principles of lean are as follows. Each one is short by design, yet together they shape how a team plans, builds and improves.

- Build Quality In - Learn Pragmatically - Keep Options Open - Respect People - Build in Resilience - Optimize the Whole - Deliver Value Quickly - Eliminate Waste

These principles read simply, however they reshape day-to-day habits in a big way. Respecting people, for instance, changes how a manager runs a stand-up. Eliminating waste, meanwhile, changes how the team scopes each task. So the value compounds as a team adopts more of them.

How to bring lean into your own practice

Disciplined Agile specifically adopts a Lean Life-Cycle as one of its key offerings. The adoption is ingenious because it is a hybrid of Agile and lean, and it borrows the strengths of both.

The Disciplined Agile Lean Life-Cycle incorporates Product Backlog, Demo, Retrospective, Kanban and many useful aspects of Agile. It does away with the concept of Iterations, or Sprints. Therefore a project running the Lean Life-Cycle continuously pulls a new piece of work, whether a user story or a task, into its Kanban board. The team then starts working on that item whenever it has capacity to do so.

Another key feature is uniform sizing. All user stories and tasks in the product backlog are of roughly the same size, and they stay very small in order to reduce the batch size. Smaller batches flow faster, so the team sees results sooner and learns quicker.

Lean is a natural fit alongside structured project management practice, and the two reinforce each other rather than clash. Many of our students blend lean ideas with formal training, since the combination suits modern delivery well. You can build the same foundation through our Disciplined Agile track or our PMP Preparation Courses.