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Lean Principles: Eliminating Waste to Maximise Customer Value

Principles and practices for minimising waste, optimising value delivery, and fostering continuous improvement through experimentation and feedback loops.

Minimising waste and maximising value through iterative learning and continuous improvement.

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Overview

Lean Principles focus on minimising waste while maximising value through iterative learning and continuous improvement. This approach is essential for organisations aiming to enhance efficiency and responsiveness in their product development processes. By fostering a culture of experimentation and feedback, Lean Principles enable teams to identify and eliminate non-value-adding activities, thereby streamlining workflows and optimising resource utilisation.

The emphasis on value delivery ensures that every action taken is aligned with customer needs, promoting a sustainable approach to product development. Lean encourages teams to adopt practices such as value stream mapping, which visualises the flow of information and materials, helping to pinpoint bottlenecks and areas for enhancement. This systemic view not only improves current processes but also lays the groundwork for long-term agility and adaptability.

Unlike Agile frameworks that may focus on iterative cycles, Lean Principles advocate for a holistic perspective, integrating insights from various methodologies to create a cohesive strategy for continuous improvement. This enables organisations to respond effectively to changing market demands while maintaining a focus on delivering high-quality products that meet customer expectations. By embedding Lean thinking into the organisational culture, teams can cultivate an environment of ongoing learning and innovation, ultimately driving sustained success and resilience in a competitive landscape.

Learn More about Lean Principles

Blog

Why Measuring Individual Cycle Time is Killing Your Flow (And What to Do Instead)

Measuring individual cycle time in Kanban misleads teams, hides real bottlenecks, and harms flow. Focus on system-wide metrics like PCE, WIP, and throughput instead.
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Value Stream Mapping

Visualising workflows to identify inefficiencies and optimise value delivery.
    Tags

    Scaling

    Coordinate multiple teams to deliver complex products while preserving agility. Focus on alignment, flow, and value delivery across the enterprise using lean principles and adaptive product structures.
    Signals

    Why Tracking Individual Cycle Time Distorts Team Behaviour

    Tracking individual cycle time can harm team performance by encouraging task cherry-picking, reduced collaboration, and lower quality, without improving overall delivery speed.
    Signals

    Toyota "andon" cord lets any worker stop production to fix defects

    Explains how true quality improvement needs both tools and a culture of safety, using Toyota’s andon cord as a lesson for Agile and Scrum adoption in organisations.
    Blog

    Why Handoffs Are Killing Your Agility

    Excessive handoffs in software development create delays, reduce quality, and harm team morale. Learn how eliminating handoffs boosts agility, flow, and value delivery.
    Tags

    Value Stream Management

    A strategic approach to improving the flow of value through an organisation, optimising efficiency, reducing waste, and aligning work with customer outcomes.
    Tags

    Continuous Improvement

    Continuous Improvement is the ongoing practice of relentless reflection and adaptation, driven by empirical evidence, aimed at consistently enhancing processes, products, and team effectiveness. It embodies a commitment to incremental and measurable advancements, fostering a culture of proactive experimentation, rapid feedback, and learning to achieve sustainable and strategic business agility.
    Videos

    Embrace Kaizen: Unlocking Continuous Improvement for Personal and Team Success

    Explains how adopting Kaizen’s continuous improvement approach can enhance personal growth, team collaboration, and process optimisation in work and daily life.
    Videos

    The Power of Kaizen: Continuous Improvement in Scrum and Beyond

    Explains how Kaizen’s continuous improvement principles enhance Scrum and Agile teams, with practical tips for retrospectives, workflow optimisation, and team culture.
    Videos

    Stop Starting and Start Finishing: The Key to Team Success

    Multitasking reduces team productivity. Learn how focusing on finishing tasks, limiting work in progress, and value-based prioritisation boosts efficiency and business value.
    Videos

    Mastering Kanban: Creating a Pull-Based System for Workflow Efficiency

    Learn how Kanban’s pull-based system boosts workflow efficiency by visualising tasks, setting WIP limits, managing bottlenecks, and enabling continuous process improvement.
    Signals

    Building the wrong thing is worse than fixing a bug

    Most features don’t deliver value. Short feedback loops and real user input help teams avoid wasted effort by ensuring they build what users actually need.
    Signals

    Why Measuring Individual Cycle Time Fails to Help Teams

    Measuring individual cycle time overlooks team performance and system bottlenecks. Focus on lead time, throughput, and process efficiency to improve workflow.
    Signals

    At the end of the day, Kanban is about improving flow

    Kanban focuses on improving workflow by removing bottlenecks and constraints, reducing work in progress, and increasing process efficiency—not by overworking people.
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    Definition of Workflow

    A Definition of Workflow explains how work moves through each stage, using clear rules and limits to make progress visible and support team collaboration and improvement.
    Videos

    Unlocking Continuous Improvement: How Metrics and Visual Tools Transform Your Workflow

    Learn how using key metrics and visual tools like Kanban boards drives continuous workflow improvement, transparency, and informed decision-making in teams.
    Workshops

    The Importance of Batch to Optimise Flow

    Discover more about The Importance of Batch to Optimise Flow and how it can help you in your Agile journey!
    Guides

    Kanban Guide

    Discover more about Kanban Guide and how it can help you in your Agile journey!
    Videos

    Why Limiting Work in Progress is Key to Success in Kanban

    Limiting work in progress in Kanban helps teams focus, spot bottlenecks, maintain quality, and deliver value efficiently by ensuring a sustainable, manageable workflow.
    Videos

    What is Kanban?

    Explains Kanban as a flexible strategy for visualising, analysing, and improving workflows, enabling continuous improvement and efficiency across any team or process.
    Videos

    Unlocking Success: The Essential Role of Product Ownership in Lean Product Delivery

    Explores how effective product ownership and lean delivery drive alignment, collaboration, adaptability, and continuous improvement in modern product development teams.
    Videos

    Unlocking Success: How Lean Product Development Transforms Decision-Making and Value Creation

    Explores how lean product development improves decision-making, reduces risk, and increases value by focusing on customer needs and efficient product ownership practices.
    Signals

    Measuring Worker Speed in Manufacturing Plant Operations

    Measuring individual worker speed in manufacturing or knowledge work can create bottlenecks; true efficiency comes from improving the whole system, not just individuals.
    Videos

    Navigating the Balance: How Lean Governance Can Boost Agility and Innovation in Your Organisation

    Explores how lean governance reduces unnecessary processes, enabling organisations to stay agile, meet compliance, and foster innovation without excess bureaucracy.
    Course

    Practicing Kanban Using Azure Boards

    All software development teams aim to enhance flow and throughput. This one-day course combines Kanban principles with Azure Boards, showing agile teams how to configure and effectively use the platform for Kanban practices. Participants will collaborate in teams on a shared project and case study to maximize learning.

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    Windows (97)

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