Lean projects’ evaluation: the perceived level of success and barriers

This work aims at analyzing if the perception of success and barriers of lean projects varies with the managers working position, measuring the perception's bias of the success and barriers of company managers. The research questions answered by this work are the following ones: is the perception of lean projects' success and lean practices implementation level biased by the position recovered by the respondent? Do respondents present a different perception of barriers experienced during lean project deployment, depending on their working position? A survey was carried out collecting information from top, middle and non-managers from 171 firms from 23 countries. Data were analysed through a Multiple Analysis of Variance in order to discover differences and similarities in lean projects' evaluation among various categories of managers and employees. Moreover, as existing literature highlighted that difficulties vary with the project progress, the Multiple Analysis of Variance was separately conducted for the start-up and the sustaining phase of the projects. Useful managerial advice can be extracted from the results since they evidence the existence of significantly different perceptions: the higher is the managerial position, the lower is the direct involvement in lean projects and the perception of success and barriers, and vice versa.