Toyota Project Management

Implementing Toyota way to Project Management

Many companies fully or partially live in a project world, yet most of them either do not realise it or they simply do not act like project-driven companies.

A project is a temporary endeavour to create a unique product, service or result. Project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to meet project requirements. This includes:

• Identifying requirements

• Defining clear and achievable objectives

• Balancing the competing demands for scope, cost, quality and timing

• Adapting the approach to the concerns and expectations of the various stakeholders

Project managers are usually ‘super heroes’ who – by chance – led a particular project to success and are then

Project failure is usually detected too late and can only be recovered with tremendous effort, time, and money. Quality management still is a rarity in projects, even though the tools are known and could easily be applied. The same holds true for project cost control and many other areas such as risk, communication or stakeholder management. No prevention is used. Risks are sometimes identified but not really reacted upon.

How can Lean management help?

Lean management – or, as explained below, the way Toyota combined the existing tools into principles – is a philosophy rather than a method or a tool.

Lean management is a system for organising and managing all aspects of a business function by creating principles, practices and tools in order to develop goods and services with higher quality and fewer defects. The general outcome is to do this by using less effort, space, capital and time. In a nutshell, the basic idea is to eliminate waste (Japanese: muda), or expressed in more positive terms: Only keep value adding steps in the process

Therefore, only the processes inherent to project management will be described below.

First of all, the different roles and responsibilities in the Team must be clearly defined, described and lived. Any gap or overlap in the system will quickly lead to major issues and, which is worse, frustration in the Team, and it will take a lot of time and effort to compensate for it. It is worth spending time to clearly describe who is doing what; a RASIC chart1) can help with the documentation.

In any process the Team needs to implement, they should not start by worrying about tools. Essentially, a tool is only useful if it supports the process, which means the process has to be described first. Only then should one look for tools that fit the modus operandi and either make it easier, faster or safer (see Principle