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178 • Green Project Management

What is lean?
The following comes from James Womack: 3

The core idea is to maximize customer value while minimizing waste. Simply,
Lean means creating more value for customers with less resources.
A Lean organization understands customer value and focuses its key
processes to continuously increase it. The ultimate goal is to provide per-
fect value to the customer through a perfect value creation process that has
zero waste.
To accomplish this, Lean thinking changes the focus of management
from optimizing separate technologies, assets, and vertical departments
to optimizing the flow of products and services through entire value
streams that flow horizontally across technologies, assets, and depart-
ments to customers.
Eliminating waste along entire value streams, instead of at isolated
points, creates processes that need less human effort, less space, less capital,
and less time to make products and services at far less costs and with much
fewer defects, compared with traditional business systems. Companies are
able to respond to changing customer desires with high variety, high qual-
ity, low cost, and with very fast throughput times. Also, information man-
agement becomes much simpler and more accurate.

In summary, like the theory of constraints, Lean thinking is about:
4

• Continuous flow of value
• Value defined by customer
• Value pulled from provider by customer
• All done in search of perfection

a Case study in lean thinking (an illustration
of lean thinking Beyond a “Project”)

A company we are familiar with uses the world’s most advanced tech-
nologies for the manufacturing of infrared optics elements includ-
ing: spherical, aspherical and diffracted optical components; mirrors;
metallic optics; and windows. These products are used in electro-opti-
cal systems, military, homeland security, commercial, and industrial
applications, ranging from night vision equipment to industrial metal
processing. The demand for this type of optics is increasing, and the
company wanted to increase its production capabilities as quickly as