Agile project management is an approach for managing a creative design and build process, where team members accept and expect change throughout the life of the project as they manage time, budget, and scope to completion. The lot like agile methods approach (LLAMA) marries the best practices of the IT world’s agile project management with instructional design best practices to deliver truly effective eLearning in an orderly-but-flexible way. Agile was first conceived by the software industry around the turn of the century, and the learning world (through approaches like SAM, A.G.I.L.E., and LLAMA) is seeing the benefits of this method as well. Estimating and building in small chunks, iterative development, and frequent customer communication are hallmarks of the agile process.

Lean principles heavily influence agile’s “orderly-but-flexible” project management style. Growing out of the total-quality-management movement, people have applied lean principles in manufacturing for decades and they have now taken firm root in healthcare as well; but viewing service processes (such as the design and development of eLearning) in light of lean is relatively new on the scene.

The eight wastes of lean

A wealth of lean literature, education, and consulting exists out in the world, but for the sake of this article, we’ll use a short definition. Lean derives from Japanese manufacturing processes, and offers a set of tools to systematically identify and eliminate waste from production systems. They define “waste” in lean as anything that does not add value to the customer. Waste adds time and cost, without increasing value. There are eight commonly recognized wastes of lean:

The waste of defects: The processing required to make a mistake, detect it, and then correct it. This one is pretty easy, especially if you grew up in the total-quality-management era. Mistakes are expensive at best, hazardous at worst. The waste of over-production: Producing more than is required to meet the needs, or producing it faster than is needed. This is when you are simply making too much “stuff.” We think of this in terms of lettuce. If you grow too much lettuce, and can’t sell it all, it rots on the truck and is useless. (Not to mention the fact that people get sick of eating lettuce and become turned off.) As we all scurry about to “do more with less,” stop first to consider whether “more” is actually useful. The waste of over-processing: Putting in more work or effort than internal or external customers need. We all want to do our very best and we like to show off our skills. It’s how we stay employed. Before you create your next 3-D-gamified-scenario-based-streaming-video-social-storytelling-mobile-xAPI course, eliminating this waste requires that you ask whether all that is really necessary for this one. The waste of inventory: Excess raw material, work in progress, or finished goods. What does “inventory” mean in a services environment? It’s work that you have completed but not yet delivered. This work provides no value to your customers. And just like the lettuce, it can rot quickly. (Professional services firms often define inventory as completed work that they have not yet billed. The goal is to keep that inventory fresh and small.) The waste of motion: Any movement of people’s bodies that does not add value to the process. This one might be deceptive at first, but don’t be fooled. Just because we eLearning types tend to spend a lot of sedentary hours at a keyboard or in meetings doesn’t mean we’re not committing the waste of motion. The waste of transportation: Transporting goods further than necessary or temporarily relocating and moving them. In the eLearning world, this is the transportation of people, files, and data. The waste of waiting: Waiting for people, material, machines, or information. The waste of waiting is familiar territory for most of us; waiting on content, reviews, sign-offs, and release. The waste of time and intelligence: Under-utilizing people by not allowing them to fully use their knowledge and skills. Perhaps this waste hits us closest to home as individuals and in our roles as professionals.

Sources and remedies for the eight wastes of lean

We gathered some of the best minds in learning today—the ones gathered at the Management XChange stage at the Learning Solutions 2014 Conference—to explore this topic in some depth. Yes, that’s right; this article has been completely crowd-sourced. After a quick introduction to agile (of the LLAMA sort) and lean, we all spent a lively hour identifying sources and remedies to each of these wastes. Here’s what we came up with. Please add to the comments below to keep the ideas flowing.