Categories: Lean
You may or may not be familiar with Shigeo Shingo’s identification of types of waste. Waste is essentially any activity which does not add value to the products being produced.
Even if you are not strictly working in a Lean methodology on your projects, these are applicable to all projects and environments, and can be avoided or mitigated if they are acknowledged.
I’ll provide my perspective from managing project teams doing software development for image data processing for a remote sensing satellite mission. If you are doing software development much of this will sound familiar, and even if you manage other types of projects I’d bet you’ll start getting ideas for your own domain.
I think you’ll be surprised at what you find when you start looking for these on your own projects, and using 5 Whys and other techniques you’ll be able to attack many of them and make your project teams more productive.
Defects
When the product doesn’t do what it needs to do, this is obviously a form of waste. There is one type of defect we call ‘bugs’ in software development. This is when there is an internal defect in the way the system works, or even just that it doesn’t meet a requirement.
There is another kind of defect though, and it’s probably the biggest form of waste in my book. It’s when you’ve produced something the customer doesn’t want. When I was a developer, I participated in creating several products that met our requirements, but when we launched them no one used them. Why?
Primarily, this was due to either a ‘pet project’ by some director in the organization who dreamed up this great system without checking to see if it would actually add value to anyone’s life. Additionally, the waterfall method without proper iteration means that by the time a product is delivered, it’s no longer what the customer wants or the interpretation of the requirements was drastically different. That’s why I love lean/agile methodologies where continuous customer feedback is critical, iteration and change is expected and encouraged.
Over-production
With physical goods this one is easy to see. Picture a warehouse full of materials because they were ‘cheaper to produce in bulk’. Producing something before it’s needed or producing too much of it is waste.
With something like software development it’s a bit different. Overproduction can take the form of producing elaborate systems to handle potential issues that are very unlikely, and could be handled manually by operators rather than trying to build the perfect system to automatically handle every little eventuality you can think of. There is maintenance of code to consider, and the time spent designing, developing, and testing code weighed against the time it will likely take for operators of the software to manually identify and fix these issues.
Transportation
In Lean manufacturing, transporting goods from an overseas supplier is often seen as waste when a local supplier can provide them, even if it costs more. The local supplier can be more responsive with shorter lead times, so you have less need to predict future demand and store input materials or finished goods taking up warehouse space.
With software projects this is largely mitigated in terms of moving product around, but can apply to moving people around. Traveling more than needed to meetings in other cities or even just the meetings we all have on a daily basis is a form of wasted potential productivity.
Waiting
Any people, parts, or other items waiting for the next step in being complete are being engaged in a form of waste.
With software development this can be the time between when coding is complete, peer reviews of the code take place, documentation is updated, and testing is performed. The more time between these steps, the longer it is going to take for the team to get re-oriented. I’ve seen peer reviews or or documentation take 10 times longer than it needed to, because the developer had to go back to the code they had written months ago and familiarize themselves with it again.
All of the queue times between steps from ‘begin’ to ‘complete’ are waste.
Inventory
With physical goods this is clearly warehouse space getting used up by goods just sitting there doing nothing.
With software, this is the list of features you’ve finished but not yet deployed to a customer. There is potential value being wasted because it has not been deployed. It also means it will take longer for you to find problems because you are delaying the crucial feedback mechanism from your customers.
Motion
This is pretty much what I said under the transportation heading. I’ll add to what I said there to mention that a huge source of waste on projects are meetings. If you or anyone on your team ever attend a meeting you can’t either 1) contribute to or 2) benefit from then it’s a form of waste. That is lost productivity that will never be regained.
Over-processing
This is essentially gold-plating. Anything you do beyond what adds value to the customer is wate. Even if you think it’s a whiz-bang cool feature, if it doesn’t get used it doesn’t add value and therefore is a form of waste.
So look around. What forms of waste can you start avoiding?
