Real-World Kanban

What Is Lean?

Lean is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination. That’s a mouthful. What does that mean?

In Lean, we judge value from the customer’s perspective. Why does this matter? It is all too easy for an organization to celebrate the success of structure, such as process methods, organizational setup, and cost reduction, and to overlook the system output—lead time, quality, and customer experience. By putting ourselves in our customers’ shoes, we can start to see the difference between doing and creating things of value.

But improving by eliminating waste is not a very effective approach in product ...