The first great paradox of lean is the combination of standardization with continual improvement. After all, if you tell a team to do the same thing every time, how can it experiment with new methods and improve? British author and psychologist John Seddon takes the argument one step further. Not only did Womack and Jones study what the Japanese were doing at the moment and completely miss any improvement opportunities, Seddon says; they also viewed the Toyota Revolution through the lens of 1980's American business, which was caught in a love affair with standards.

If practices are supposed to continually evolve, how exactly do you "do" lean? , co-author of two books on lean software, gave me one clue in an interview. "Lean isn't something you do," she says. "It is a way of thinking."

The simple part of the lean philosophy is the waste. If you have technical staff sitting around, doing nothing, waiting for a build, that is waste. If they are waiting to set up a server, or need training to complete a task, that is also waste. Excess work in progress inventory is waste.

In some ways, waste is in the eye of the beholder. Metrics, measures, estimates, audits, plans and process may all add visibility to upper management--or keep the happy--but the technical team itself may see no benefit at all from the practices.