Lean Project Management - How to Apply Lean Thinking to Project Management

This book shows how the principles of Lean Management can be applied to project management and how some typical problems of project management can be solved by this.

The author first provides a theoretical description of what project management is about and explains its tasks and methods as well as its limitations. He also describes how the Lean idea came about and derives five principles from it that can also be applied to project management. Along these principles, the author then elaborates typical current challenges of project management and shows how these challenges can be tackled through Lean Project Management. In doing so, he does not stop at the level of principles, but describes specific tasks and tools that are useful especially for experienced practitioners of project management.

This book is a translation of the original German 1st edition Lean Project Management - Wie man den Lean-Gedanken im Projektmanagement einsetzen kann by Rainer Erne, published by Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature in 2019. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors.

Rainer Erne is professor for product, process and project management at the Nürtingen-Geislingen University of Applied Sciences. He previously worked as a project manager in various industrial companies for over 15 years and is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP).