Imagine you have a reliable compass that guides you from the roots of Lean in manufacturing all the way to modern approaches in IT and services. That’s exactly what we’ll explore here: how Lean began at Toyota, how it evolved into Agile and DevOps – and what practical steps you can take yourself.
The Starting Point Lean in Manufacturing
Your compass’s “North” lies in Japan in the 1950s, when Toyota began developing a new production system. This Toyota Production System (TPS) was built on:
– Elimination of waste (Muda)
– Continuous improvement (Kaizen)
– Pull systems (e.g., Kanban)
– Respect for people and involving employees
Although Taiichi Ohno, Shigeo Shingo, and other Toyota pioneers initially passed on their knowledge mostly internally, influential books like Toyota Production System*by Taiichi Ohno[1] and A Study of the Toyota Production System by Shigeo Shingo[2] later brought TPS worldwide attention.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Lean was popularized by works such as Masaaki Imai’s Kaizen[3] as well as The Machine That Changed the World[4] and Lean Thinking[5] by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones. Western industry soon realized that Lean could make processes more efficient, improve quality, and better involve people in improvement initiatives.
Changing Course From the Shop Floor to IT
Your compass now points to a new direction – IT and product development. The article “The New New Product Development Game” (1986) by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka[6] highlighted that cross-functional, self-organized teams and rapid iterations can spark true innovation. Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland later built on these ideas to develop Scrum.
2001 marked a milestone: the Agile Manifesto[7] with its four values and twelve principles directly linked to Lean concepts. Rapid feedback loops, a constant focus on delivering maximum value to the customer, and an emphasis on essentials closely resembled Lean’s core ideas. Scrum – first described in detail in Agile Software Development with Scrum by Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle[8] – put these ideas into practice.
Mary and Tom Poppendieck underscored this connection in 2003 with Lean Software Development An Agile Toolkit [9], showing that agility is essentially Lean repackaged for a new environment fast, streamlined, value-oriented, waste-free, and continuously improving.
DevOps From Individual Teams to the Entire Value Stream
Now your compass zooms out from software development to the entire process. Books like Continuous Delivery [10] and The DevOps Handbook [14] made it clear that efficiency and fast value delivery don’t end with development. By consistently automating and tightly integrating development and operations (Dev and Ops), you can eliminate long wait times, coordination problems, and seemingly endless release cycles.
DevOps demonstrates how a continuous flow – from idea to delivery – is possible, aligning with Lean principles but tailored to the IT world. The Phoenix Project [13] introduced these ideas to a wider audience by using a novel-like format, showing how companies can optimize their IT processes with Lean and DevOps practices. Accelerate [15] offered scientific evidence that these approaches really do lead to faster deployment cycles, greater stability, and better business outcomes.
Sources:
[1]: Ohno, T. (1978/1988) Toyota Production System Beyond Large Scale Production. Productivity Press
[2]: Shingo, S. (1981) A Study of the Toyota Production System From an Industrial Engineering Viewpoint. CRC Press
[3]: Imai, M. (1986) Kaizen The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success. McGraw Hill
[4]: Womack, J. P. Jones, D. T. Roos, D. (1990) The Machine That Changed the World. Free Press
[5]: Womack, J. P. Jones, D. T. (1996) Lean Thinking. Simon & Schuster
[6]: Takeuchi, H. Nonaka, I. (1986) The New New Product Development Game. Harvard Business Review Jan–Feb 1986
[7]: Agile Alliance (2001) Manifesto for Agile Software Development [the agile manifesto](https://agilemanifesto.org)
[8]: Schwaber, K. Beedle, M. (2002) Agile Software Development with Scrum. Prentice Hall
[9]: Poppendieck, M. Poppendieck, T. (2003) Lean Software Development An Agile Toolkit. Addison-Wesley
[10]: Humble, J. Farley, D. (2010) Continuous Delivery. Addison-Wesley
[11]: Anderson, D. J. (2010) Kanban Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business. Blue Hole Press
[12]: Ries, E. (2011) The Lean Startup. Crown Business
[13]: Kim, G. Behr, K. Spafford, G. (2013) The Phoenix Project. IT Revolution Press
[14]: Kim, G. Humble, J. Debois, P. Willis, J. (2016) The DevOps Handbook. IT Revolution Press
[15]: Forsgren, N. Humble, J. Kim, G. (2018) Accelerate The Science of Lean Software and DevOps. IT Revolution Press
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