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What's the Muda with your project?

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We'd like to congratulate Leslie Ekas and Scott Will on an excellent blog post here at Projects At Work and take the liberty of connecting this - perhaps unexpectedly - to sustainability in PM.

In their post, found right here (see, we source locally), the authors do two important things in our opinion:

  • They provide specific examples of how to make a software project more efficient (free of wasted effort)
  • They provide a context for connecting the project to business goals and 'greening' the project itself, even if it has nothing to do (directly) with social responsibility or the environment.  The article does this by conveying the concept of 'proejct debt'.

Regarding the first bullet, we really encourage you to read this article whether or not you are involved in software projects because what they have to say is important in general for any project.  We do tend to get used to waste.  We get comortable with it.  As they say, "teams have grown accustomed to living with it. And if a team can justify allowing it in the first place, then it can often justify living with it “a little longer.”

Regarding the second one, the connection to sustainability is right in this quote: "If not remedied, these shortcuts can hinder the long-term viability of any product".  This has been one of our themes since the release of the book, Green Project Management, which asserts that project success is really only true success if the product of the project is viable in the long term.

And yet, that beig said, the connection to our book is much, much stronger.  We dedicate an entire chapter "Lean Thinking, Muda, and the Four Ls" to the idea of removing waste from the project itself.    Our 4L principle - Lean, Learn, Linked, and Lasting, provides an approach to applyiing the ideas raised in this article to any type of project as well as the product of that project.

Below is a summary of that chapter taken directly from the book.

 Figure courtesy CRC Press, Green Project Management, (C) 2010 CRC Press

 

So we suggest combining the ideas in the article from Ekas and Will1 with the ideas from our book, Green Project Management, to make your project - and its product - greener and more sustainable, as well as one that can earn your company more green.

 



1( the article on P@W and their book, Being Agile: Eleven Breakthrough Techniques to Keep You from "Waterfalling Backward" by Leslie Ekas & Scott Will, published by Pearson/IBM Press, Oct. 2013, ISBN 9780133375626, © Copyright 2014 by International Business Machines Corporation. For more info please visit http://www.ibmpressbooks.com/store/being-agile-eleven-breakthrough-techniques-to-keep-9780133375626 )


Posted by Richard Maltzman on: January 25, 2014 12:43 PM | Permalink

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