Lean and Lean Six Sigma

The Concise Reads Management Series gives us some of the important tools in the management tool belt including problem solving, communicating, and building a team. The guides are concise on purpose and should take you no more than an hour or so to read but the principles within them take weeks and months to master. These are essential principles to find success as a manager or leader and therefore it is important that you absorb them and turn them into habits.

Lean & Lean Six Sigma Introduction:"To produce only what is needed, when it is needed and in the amount needed" -- Taiichi Ohno

In the previous Concise Reads, we discovered the framework for Agile software development. Agile was the necessary framework to build a product, but in order to build a company that scales we need to learn about the concepts of streamlining a business process taught in the frameworks of Lean and Six Sigma.

To simplify our understanding of how these frameworks work together we have created the following simple schema of the product value chain:

AGILE → LEAN → LEAN SIX SIGMA

Pick up your copy and a nice cup of coffee and get the introduction to Lean and Six Sigma everyone should know. When you're ready, ask your boss to sponsor you for your yellow belt certification course.

In this guide we’ll learn about:

• Basic of Lean thinking
• The Toyota model
• The core principles of Lean
• The Lean Toolkit
• Expanding on Lean with Lean Six Sigma
• Different Sigma Performance Levels
• Additional example models and a short discourse on thinking about getting a certification

This Series covers the following topics commonly taught in Management programs:

• PROBLEM SOLVING
• THE ART OF COMMUNICATION
• TEAM BUILDING
• AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
• LEAN & LEAN SIX SIGMA