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Lean Thinking, Muda, and the Four Ls

lean thinking and your ProjeCt
The overarching principle for this section is that Lean thinking can and
should be applied to the project itself as well as be folded into the planning
for the product of the project. The PM can be a change agent not only for
the project but for the long-term effects of the project (the operation of the
project’s product). In other words, you, the PM, can make a lasting differ-
ence for the organization, and even beyond, to the population outside your
organization and even beyond this generation.
One of the concepts threaded through Lean thinking is the theory of
constraints, which should not be a foreign concept to project managers
because it has found its way into project management in the form of criti-
cal chain project management and is at the heart of agile methodologies,
such as those used in software development (Scrum, XP, DSDM).
As PMs we know that to use the critical chain, we revise the critical
path project plan with resource constraints to get the critical chain project
plan. Where the critical path is based on task dependencies, the critical
chain is based on the additional (and important) information we get when
we look at resource dependencies. The critical chain method (as illustrated
by Herbie, the slow hiker in Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal ) allows us to
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identify the bottleneck or constrained resource.
For those of you not familiar with The Goal, here is a summary of that
portion of the book:

The protagonist of the book, Alex Rogo, takes his son and his son’s Boy Scout
troop on a hike. The slowest hiker, Herbie, keeps falling behind the rest of
the hikers, and the queue in front of him keeps stretching out because the
leaders (by definition) are walking much more quickly. The quickest hikers
generally have no space between them and the Scout in front of them. Rogo
realizes that even if the quickest hikers slow down or stop (to take a breath,

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