Fundamentals of Assurance for Lean Projects: An overview for Auditors and Project Teams

Fundamentals of Assurance for Lean Projects explains the fundamental concepts of Lean and how they can be applied to any project, including software development and organisational change.

It explains the jargon and dispels the mystique that surrounds Lean, providing readers with guidance and tips on performing audits or assurance reviews for Lean projects.

It also describes how Lean fits with Agile and Kanban, and how it can be combined with Six Sigma to create an efficient, high-quality approach. The book provides strong practical guidance for those tasked with providing assurance for Lean projects.

Read this book to learn about the approach and principles of Lean, the governance of Lean projects, and Lean audit and review. Topics covered include:

• The five main Lean principles and their significance.
• Tools used for root-cause analysis (the five whys and fishbone analysis).
• Defining and modelling customer value, and innovative responses to customer needs (the Kano model).
• Common causes of waste and how to improve flow.
• Customer pull and Kanban mechanisms to manage the associated flow of processing and information.
• The pursuit of perfection (Kaikaku and Kaizen) and total quality management (TQM).
• The application of Lean principles to software development.
• Practical suggestions for approaches to auditing.

As with all books in the Fundamentals Series, Fundamentals of Assurance for Lean Projects introduces the subject and includes references for those who would like to further investigate specific areas.

About the Author

Christopher Wright is a qualified accountant, a Certified Information Systems Auditor and a Certified ScrumMaster with over 30 years’ experience providing financial and IT advisory and risk management services. For 16 years he worked at KPMG, where he was head of information risk training in the UK and ran training courses in overseas locations, including India and mainland Europe. He managed a number of major IS audit and risk assignments, including project risk and business control reviews. He has worked in a wide range of industry sectors, including oil and gas, the public sector, aviation, and travel. For the past ten years, he has been an independent consultant specialising in financial, SOX and operational controls for major ERP implementations, mainly at oil and gas enterprises.

He is an international speaker and trainer for Agile audit and governance, and is the author of three other titles, also published by ITGP: Agile Governance and Audit, Reviewing IT in Due Diligence and Fundamentals of Information Risk Management Auditing.