- Originally from Toyota’s approach to manufacturing
- originally designed to solve the problem of creating a wide variety of different types of cars for the Japanese market
- this enabled Toyota to build cars faster, cheaper and with higher quality than the competition
- the US manufacturing industry only survived by adopting these ideas and methods
- Characteristics
- Limit work in progress
- Visual management
- create and maintain visual displays to show key quality and productivity metrics and the current status of work (also problems)
- make these displays available to both engineers and leaders
- align these goals with operational goals
- Feedback from production
- Use data from application performance and infrastructure monitoring tools to make business relevant decisions on a daily basis
- Lightweight change approvals
- Books
- Lean Software Development (Marry and Tom Poppendieck)
Lean Management