The concept of “Lean Management” was originally developed in the Automotive Industry, reducing waste in manufacturing processes. However, in recent years it became also popular in areas of non-repetitive processes, such as product development or administration. Laurent Kummer proposes in his new book “The Lean Project Manager” a complete guide to transform project managers through 6 lean principles into lean thinkers. Laurent is Project Manager and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. He is an official expert at the European Commission in Brussels, Belgium as main contributor to the European Project Management Methodology (PM²); through NBN, the Belgian standards office he represents Belgium at the International Standard Organisation Technical Committee 258 and work at the development of the international standard on project management (e.g. ISO 21500). Through his experience collected in IT and Quality projects, mainly for large private companies and for the public sector, he proposes tips and tricks to Lean our practice of project management, to avoid common waste pitfalls and he presents own experiments made on the field to improve the personal productivity of the project manager through the use of Lean principles.

He summarizes his experiences as follows: “When it comes to leaning the practice of project management, I have rarely seen any company taking the problem correctly from the start. In these times of immediate purchase, instant download, online implementation of life, many quality leaders are expecting from Lean a turn-key solution, purchasing a few templates from the web or paying a few hours or day of an expensive consultant. This rarely ends well. Then you have the next level, with organizations that have the means and the time to invest in a Lean transformation. These organizations will rely on their existing project structures and resources to conduct the necessary changes. The Lean transformation becomes a project, and commonly used methods will be used, a project manager will be named, etc. The chances of success of such endeavor are variable, and they will depend on the usual factors affecting most projects: the talent of the project manager, support from the board, communication and so on. What is crucial to realize is that in none of the successful Lean transformations I could see or participate, did the transformation had an impact on the project management practice itself. We lean the business processes, maybe some back-office activities or support functions but rarely, if ever, how we run projects. It is a surprising fact when you know that usually a significant part of yearly budgets are spent on projects.”

What is the core of “The Lean Project Manager”? Lean means basically maximizing the value delivered to customers. This is done in lowering (or removing if possible) any form of non-added value activities. This is called waste, and waste is bad, according to the pioneers of Lean. That is why the toolset they have invented aims at identifying and removing the waste. It is important to understand why the tools have been invented to use them properly: a good lean project manager understands what’s behind the tools, why they are here and how to use them correctly.

Laurent Kummer provides a short list of usual suspects in waste generation and how they can be tackled

1. Meetings. I recently met a senior executive who was two months in his new role. He confessed that he had “over couple hundred meetings in the first month. Every time there is something new, I am dragged into another meeting without the time to address the issues raised on the previous one. I feel like nothing is achieved but meeting organization.” Another typical project situation: an hour length project status meeting with the 12 project members, each having 5 min to give a status update to the project manager. I can tell you with precision the waste: Eleven hours wasted (yes 11hrs!) because each will give valuable input during 5 minutes and waste 55 others sitting in the meeting. If you use the average hour rate of your project team, you can easily figure out how much it is in the end.
   Solution: be fierce and fearless when it comes to meetings: prefer one to one interactions with your team, and limit meetings to the minimum, for example, decision-making meetings (steering committees for example).
2. Documentation. There are two typical behaviors around project documentation: exhaustive documentation, heavy, costly, where we write things that are never read; and the “no documentation at all” popular in so-called “Agile” practices. In the former situation, waste is the effort needed to create something that will never be used (over production in Lean). Like using a project management method that comes with tons of templates and we use brute approach to staying compliant: we fill out everything. On the latter, the waste is indirect: because no documentation exists about something (product or decision), knowledge is lost and efforts are needed to investigate, remember, recreate the object of the documentation (rework in Lean terms).
   Solution: Start with the customers of the documentation: what do they want to see, what do they want to keep, what is adapted to my project, my environment? And fill in accordingly. A Project Office can be a good partner in this situation to pre-customize, and pre-populate documents based on the context. Note: Agile will never be about “no documentation!”
3. Reporting. A specific form of documentation but with special treatment. Reporting is often standardized and rarely adapted to the needs of the (three) customers. And very often duplicated (one budget sheet for the project customer, one for my boss, one for the accounting department, one for me…). The granularity of reports is often not adapted to decision making.
   Solution: Know what the report customers want to see, invest in a reporting tool to enter the data only once, involve communication specialists (yes, a report is a communication tool) to tailor the report to the audience.

The Lean toolset is able to help to identify and to address the waste. But that is not really how you will make a lasting impact on the project management practice. A profound Lean transformation is a culture change. You cannot change a culture by adopting tools or changing some processes here and there. It’s all about people. Lean is, above all, about people. Respecting them, empowering them, training them, improving them. This is no small challenge, but Lean is ready for that with its Kaizen concept: small increments toward the ideal goal. (Would be) lean project managers and project members need to acquire specific competencies, little by little, that will comfort them in the everyday exercise of Lean. The good news is that these competencies will probably also boost their career big time. I have developed over the years a model that fit the needs of lean teams, as you can see in the picture below.
Other good competencies framework like IPMA ICB and OCB propose very comprehensive and complete guidelines to develop individuals or organizations. Only by enabling people to think and act in a Lean way you will be able to lean the project management practice. Key enablers for a Lean Project Manager include but are not limited to: First of all, top management. They not only have to support (by financing training, organizational changes, communication) and to lead by example as well. A second key enabler is a project management office (PMO). A PMO can be a great partner and a major stakeholder when it comes to leaning project management: helping to identify what brings value in the current, local practice, customizing documentation, leveraging reports, facilitating training, etc. Finally, the community of project managers and lean practitioners can provide meaningful help and contribute to the success of the enterprise…

The book is available on Amazon and IPMA members get a 15% discount on the PDF and EPUB versions through this page: http://www.six-sig.com/books.html