Time: 5-10 Minutes
Purpose: Think about activities you or your team may perform that are unnecessary or redundant.
Introduction: In Lean, things like slow handoffs, waiting, overwork, or bad personnel assignment are usually considered “waste”. Sometimes we don’t even realize that our daily activities include this waste.
Activity: Reflect on your daily and weekly work, thinking about which tasks are redundant, unnecessary, or may otherwise be considered waste.
- Identify and list waste on your team
- List new activities you or your team could do to help the team move through these bottlenecks.
As always, please share your notes on this thread. Chances are that we will find patterns of waste on our teams, as well as common solutions and methods to accelerate our teams.
Waste in my team, hmm. I think there is a fair bit of waste:
- Poor participation at refinement. When we come to refine stories we approach it as a whole-team activity, partially because we don’t know who we’re going to need in the room, we like everyone to benefit from the same knowledge, etc.
Solution: Really easy one - first up we work with product to ensure higher quality stories reach the team in the first place. This reduces the need to refine stories. Secondly we institute something like Three Amigos/Rule Of Three
- Silent Code Reviewers. We have a minimum threshold of approvals before code can be committed. We frequently see people who do not contribute to the process of reviewing and just add an approval. This is potentially a total waste of time, not to mention a dangerous false positive.
Solution: Consider revision of approval threshold to introduce greater individual responsibility for reviews. Approach and discuss silent reviews with those responsible for them. Build greater emphasis on feedback than approvals given. Review silent approvals to see if we have had false positives (anecdotally we have, but we lack data to approach this empirically).
- Underutilisation of testers. This is a particularly acute challenge right now. We have a lot of testers doing tasks which aren’t testing and that has proven frustrating for them. This can include getting ready to test - lots of setup and environment building, training in new systems etc; or involvement in technical investigations, which feels like putting the wrong person on the job.
Solution: Modern Testing? Getting the team better equipped to support other teammates in activities using skills and personality traits they DO have, doing work they DO find rewarding or positive. Asking questions, improving the quality of conversations and building a stronger team.
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The most common “waste” I experienced in many projects was besides the lack of tooling the lack of given roles and rights from external systems and environments. Or an appropiate contact person with knowledge of the roles and rights.
So I (or when I was together with other testers in a project) did detect this waste as a project risk which should be eliminated to get rid of that bottleneck. In some cases this led to other “challenges” but at least the list of waste items got smaller and throughout time and transparent information the quality improved and also other teams did profit from our work.
It often is not always the technical waste which blocks, it’s the inbetween and sometimes not documented information.