How to Run a Project more effectively using Lean Management

Abstract

Lean management has been commented as being one of the most effective and efficient forms of management through waste minimisation and maximising resource utilisation. Organisations have two types of lean management concerns, social and technical. Social lean management involves managing the human-centric aspects of the organisation, and technical lean management involves the use of training, tools, operations management and organisational culture. SWOT analysis of both social and technical factors are conducted. Social factors include human resource management, leadership management, and employee management. Technical factors include operations management, and organisational culture. The SWOT analysis reveals that the strength of lean management is in its ability to holistically improve the knowledge, skills, communication, collaborative efforts, motivation to work, health and safety protocols, transparency, trust, effectiveness and efficiency of the organisation. Weaknesses of lean management lies in its high requirements of investment, in terms of money, time, and effort, with a lot of resources needing to be dedicated to training and management, in buying operations management tools and in hiring coaches for leadership roles, with success being the only option due to low tolerance of error. In terms of opportunity, it allows an organisation to become more noticeable in the market, innovate more, collaborate more, create stronger relationships, ore out of workers by encouraging them to go above and beyond the minimum requirements of their jobs, and create leaders from within the organisation. Finally, lean management can be a threat for those organisations that falter, or cannot dedicate fully to lean implementation stages, incurring huge losses for the organisation, and causing them to fall behind in the competition, as well as pose a risk of low job satisfaction due to large levels of stress from high expectations of needing to adapt quickly. Based on the SWOT analysis, future recommendations are made for organisation to adopt lean management.