When I featured the five laws of Lean, Reden, a colleague, requested that I do one more post on the fifth law, which is the law of complexity and cost. This made me do some more research on the subject to back my own understanding. During my research, I came across the five laws of Lean Sigma again and this time with the other four laws being defined. Thus, I posted Laws of Lean Six Sigma defined.
I must say, among the five laws, it’s the fifth that is quite interesting, especially during this time of keeping things simple, efficient, and of high quality.
The law of complexity and cost works on the premise that when you develop something complex, naturally there are more processes involved, which may or may not be really necessary for the desired output. Because there are more processes—or what is termed WIP, work in process—it will naturally involve more cost.
In the given definition of the fifth law, a complex processes are said to be more costly than those that are of low quality and speed. But you may ask, shouldn’t all processes be done with quality in mind? Yes, of course. Besides, you cannot help processes to becoming complex over time. It is a natural occurrence as you try to continuously improve processes. That is why it is important that we are able to manage the complexity of our processes to reduce costs, and yet ensure high quality processes. There lies the value of the law of complexity and cost: managing complexity and its cost and work towards lean.
The following links will illustrate more the laws of complexity and cost, and how to manage them.
An article on TechRepublic gives us some insights on managing the cost of complexity by striking a balance and controlling complexity to a certain leve that is still functional to the company.
Over at Electronic Design, an article shows how less complexity and cost push feature-driven autotechnology.
Then Coding Horror: programming and human factors shows the effect of the cost of software complexity.
*Photo from Stock.Xchng
