Why lean

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That makes hardware changes much more difficult and costly to implement. In that situation, engineers may decide to pursue non-hardware alternatives; for example, revisiting fan speeds and timing settings at the BIOS level to keep the processor cooler for longer. Another manufacturing scenario where the 5 Whys might make sense to apply: Imagine you are part of a production team responsible for producing sedans in a specific plant.

Using the 5 Whys, your team is able to narrow down one part in the production process that continues to slow down the team. Due to part changes, mounting the engine now requires three additional manual steps.

In this case, the team could work with leadership to automate portions of new steps to improve overall production times. Software development is another place where the 5 Whys could prove helpful. You could be a member of a development team responsible for delivering a release candidate to a customer in the next four weeks.

Members of the team voice concern with meeting the delivery deadline. Hiring more developers is not an option due to budget reasons. After team discussion, the project lead apprises the customer of the situation, proposing a way to deprioritize secondary elements of the core feature functionality. This compromise allows the team to meet the original delivery schedule for the core product. The team then extends the schedule to deliver the secondary elements as a feature update three weeks after product delivery.

One of the leading reasons for failure is that it comes down to lean requiring hard work. First and foremost is the knowledge work — the thinking required to develop a future state and a path to make it a reality. As creatures of habit, humans tend to focus on executing the current state better, faster or in greater quantity; not necessarily blazing a new trail or re-imagining a series of processes.

Oftentimes, dedicated thinking time is the first activity to be cut out when we become fixated on problems that are staring us in the face, or when we begin to feel overburdened. As you can see, Lean management was not created in a moment.

Instead, it is evolving gradually, thanks to many observations and people's desire for continuous improvement. What does every company strive to do?

The value lies in the problem you are trying to solve for the customer. More specifically, in the part of the solution that your customer is actively willing to pay. This is the point where you literally need to map the workflow of your company. It has to include all actions and people involved in delivering the end product to the customer. By doing so, you will be able to identify what parts of the process bring no value.

Applying the Lean principle of value stream mapping will show you where value is being generated and in what proportion different parts of the process do or do not produce value.

When you have your value stream mapped, it will be much easier for you to see which processes are owned by what teams and who is responsible for measuring, evaluating, and improving that process.

After you mastered your value stream, you need to make sure that each team's workflow remains smooth. Keep in mind that it may take a while. Bottlenecks and interruptions may appear at any time. However, by breaking up work into smaller batches and visualizing the workflow, you can easily detect and remove process roadblocks. Having a stable workflow guarantees that your teams can deliver work tasks much faster with less effort.

However, in order to secure a stable workflow, make sure to create a pull system when it comes to the Lean methodology.