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You can usually tell when a project is drifting off course by recognizing a few key warning signs. Delays, rising costs, and unclear priorities often point to deeper issues in how work is planned and executed. If your team spends more time reacting to crises than delivering planned value, or if progress seems invisible despite plenty of activity, the project’s workflow might be broken. Stakeholder frustration, scope creep, and unclear alignment with business goals further signal that your project may no longer be delivering value efficiently. In these moments, Lean Project Management principles—focusing on customer value, streamlining workflows, and eliminating waste—can help realign efforts and restore steady, value-driven progress.
Typical Scenarios Indicating Trouble
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Project wastes are elements within a project that, instead of delivering value, create more problems than benefits. These wastes not only drain productivity but also lead to delays and defects in delivery, as well as negatively impacting team morale and customer satisfaction.
The very first step toward Lean Project Management is recognizing and eliminating these wastes. However, in project environments, waste often hides in plain sight, camouflaged as "necessary work." Let's explore how to identify these hidden wastes. Over-Delivery happens when teams deliver too much or too soon beyond what the customer needs. For example, a team spends weeks creating detailed 50-page reports when a one-page executive summary would have been enough. In another case, a development team completed an entire feature set months before the client's business process was ready to use it, forcing costly rework later. Building "nice-to-have" system features that no one requested or will ever use. These situations often exhaust teams and create extra handoffs that add complexity rather than value. Over-processing occurs when work is done at a higher level of precision or complexity than necessary. For example, creating a polished presentation for a readout may not improve the substance of the discussion if a well-formatted working document can do the job. Excessive approval chains through five different managers only slow things down when a simple decision can be made. Mistakes occur when quality control is insufficient, leading to poor output that must be fixed after delivery. In one project with a missed configuration check that caused backup jobs for a critical client system to fail, the remediation consumed two weeks and delayed the rest of the rollout. Errors like these don't just cost time—they damage trust with the customer. Waiting means Idle time is another of the most corrosive wastes. When expectations are unclear, dependencies remain unresolved, or required inputs arrive late. An untracked approval queue caused by a firewall rule change caused an entire cloud migration team to sit idle for three days! No amount of hard work from the project team could recover that lost time. Void Motion refers to movement without progress—team members are busy, yet their work does not generate value. This could be people hunting for information they need but cannot locate, or performing actions disconnected from customer outcomes. In one case, an engineer manually compiled weekly status reports from five different tools—a task that could have been automated in under an hour. Transportation (Unnecessary Handoffs) waste occurs when work or information moves between people, teams, or systems without adding value. This might involve passing a document through three managers before it reaches the decision-maker, or repeatedly transferring data between incompatible tools. In one enterprise rollout, a change request had to pass between four different departments—none of whom altered it—before it was finally actioned. Every extra handoff is an opportunity for delay, miscommunication, or loss of context. Inventory waste covers unused or disorganized materials, code, and documentation. If you see outdated templates, forgotten spreadsheets, and half-finished project plans and technical guides, these are inventory waste. These wastes not only create confusion but also require ongoing storage, maintenance, and security oversight—costs with no return. In software projects, unmerged code branches that linger for months are another costly form of inventory waste. When these wastes accumulate, the impact is measurable: over-delivery burns out teams, over-processing creates activity without outcomes, mistakes erode trust, waiting fosters bottlenecks, void motion drains morale, transportation delays decision-making, and excess inventory clutters workflows. Lean Project Management addresses this head-on by making waste visible and deliberately removing it. The goal is not simply to "work less," but to ensure that every action serves a clear purpose, directly advancing project goals and customer outcomes. In my experience, when teams learn to see and eliminate waste, they recover capacity, accelerate delivery, and dramatically improve the quality of what they produce. The change is not just operational—it transforms the way teams think about value itself. |
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