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Eliminating Waste is the first Lean Development Principle. In Lean Software Development, anything that does not add value to the customer is considered to be waste. According to traditional Lean Manufacturing, there are seven wastes: transportation, inventory, motion, waiting, overproduction, over-processing, and defects. The website, codepunk.io defined seven wastes of software development which is a great adaptation of these seven applied to software development:

1. Partially done work: This is what it is… work that is only partially done. Software development waste.
2. Extra features: Bloat, unneeded code complexity, useless features. Software development waste.
3. Relearning: Solving hard problems and not documenting them. Recoding hard problems repeatedly. Software development waste.
4. Handoffs: More people, more communication, more problems. Software development waste.
5. Context Switching: AKA… multitasking. Don’t spread developers across projects. It’s expensive mentally and financially. Software development waste.
6. Delays: Delays in review, delays in handoffs, delays in feedback. Software development waste.
7. Defects: Bugs. Extra work at bad times. Software development waste.

Sidebar: Why did we repeat the term “software development waste” seven times? Because we’re trying to get search engines to find us in Atlanta. But we digress…

Waste in the Real World

Because knowing is half the battle, it’s worth taking a look at some other wastes. Specifically, the kinds of wastes that we can all relate to. The kind of wastes that are hiding in plain sight. Things like…

• Agenda-less meetings, meetings with the wrong people, being late to meetings (you’re being inconsiderate and wasting everyone else’s time), meetings about meetings, meetings where the action items are more meetings, redundant meetings.
• Allowing software tooling (things like JIRA, Trello, etc.) to slow down teams. Sometimes teams don’t easily grasp these tools, especially if they lack experience. This software is great… no denying… but it’s okay to delay usage of it if teams need better training or if it’s just getting in the way.
• Creating “digital litter” – Overly-abundant documentation, preparing presentations that never gets presented or presenting to the wrong audience (see the first bullet).
• Conflating “doing email” with “doing work”. To those of you sitting behind Microsoft Outlook all day, emailing the days away… you’re possibly wasting your own time by assuming that everyone else is reading your messages. Believe it or not, some people like to do “work, work” <- that’s not necessarily email.
• Spending time griping and commiserating without being solution-minded.
• Typing out status reports when you could be using a tool like JIRA to present a status dashboard that is just always up-to-date.
• Staffing too many people to a project because you think you just need people. Staffing people to too many things.

Combatting Waste

So, it’s great that we know what the wastes are. But the next step is eliminating it. It’s one thing to talk about it but it’s another thing to do it. We’ve learned that the best first step to take is to simply raise awareness. As a leader in an organization, you can take a few initial proactive steps:

1. Take time to identify specific practices you see are wasteful in your organization or department. Document these.
2. Identify the culprits – is it certain individuals? Pockets of people? A problem with a process? Document your findings.
3. Draft solutions
4. Talk to your team about the importance of eliminating waste. Share your findings with them. Share your solutions.
5. Cultivate a culture that proactively eliminates waste.

This is the first of an eight part series on Lean Thinking and the principles that comprise a Lean Development process.

Before we jump in, it’s important to provide a brief background on Lean and what we’re referring to when we use the term. Lean Manufacturing is a methodology which is often attributed to the Toyota Production System (that’s right, the car manufacturer). At its highest level, the methodology was created to quickly find and eliminate waste in the manufacturing process. Waste, as defined here, is anything that does not provide value to a customer. The easiest way to think about this process is to consider an assembly line. In an assembly line, the product moves from step to step during its manufacturing. If there is a breakdown or problem at any step of the way, production halts until the issue is resolved. That problem could be a defect with the product itself or an issue with the assembly process directly. Either way the focus remains on the elimination of waste and on the relentless pursuit of quality and improvement. Again, the goal is to remove anything that does not provide value to the customer. The Lean manufacturing system for Toyota dates back to the 1940’s, has been widely adopted across different industries, and is a proven way to deliver high quality products faster.

So, how does this relate to software development?

In 2003, Mary and Tom Poppendieck published a book titled, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit. Here, they are credited with bringing the Lean methodology to the technology landscape. In their book, the Poppendiecks define seven Lean Development Principles:

1. Eliminate waste
2. Amplify Learning
3. Decide as late as possible
4. Deliver as late as possible
5. Empower the team
6. Build integrity in
7. See the whole

This series takes an in-depth look at each of these principles. A lot of information can be found around the web on these, but we intend to take an approach which brings each into a real-world focus. For example, last week we shared just a few examples of the many reasons why technology projects are often over budget, delayed, or never released. If we bring those examples into focus here, you’ll see how each one corresponds to one of these seven principles. This series will dive into similar real-world examples and discuss how Lean Thinking can help alleviate these types of problems.

• Teams (and more importantly, managers) are submerged in wall-to-wall meetings: Eliminate waste
• Sacrificing quality for speed of delivery: Build integrity in
• Hero Culture – “Oh no! Tom isn’t here. We really need Tom for this…”: Amplify learning
• Suboptimal project planning and forecasting: Decide as late as possible
• Over-engineered solutions: Deliver as late as possible
• Individual contributors are spread between projects, forced to context switch more than should be acceptable: Empower the team
• Teams are too big; roles are not well defined: See the whole

As we expound on these principles, we’ll take a slightly different angle on each (sometimes differing from what was originally defined by the Poppendiecks), but each will relate directly back to these seven core principles.

The hardest part about technology projects is rarely technology. The real challenges typically lie within team composition, process, and how individuals communicate. These things aren’t easy to fix; they aren’t even always easy to see. From small business to the enterprise, the pace of commerce is increasing exponentially. Today’s managers and business owners are inundated with new information, new ways to stay connected, notifications, and ultimately… distractions. It’s not easy to prioritize and that makes it easy to overlook even the most obvious problems.

These days, we so often hear things like, technology will enable human potential. These kinds of statements feel backwards. It’s human potential that should unlock technology; not the opposite. We’re certainly not denying the power of technology, it’s what we do, but we want to reshape the narrative. Technology is distracting us more and more. It’s distracting managers, it’s making people less accountable, and many times it’s even creating an illusion of productivity. After all, doing email doesn’t always equate to doing work. Anyway, while tasks like building apps, writing code, and consulting on delivery management is what we do, our mission is to help our clients unlock human potential through team empowerment, smarter ways of working, and setting the next generation up for success.

Bringing this back to the technology… so many technology projects are over budget, behind schedule, or are never even released. It’s almost an epidemic, really. It’s a waste of time, money, and human potential. Let’s take a look at just some of the reasons for this:

• Teams (and more importantly, managers) are submerged in wall-to-wall meetings
• Sacrificing quality for speed of delivery
• Hero Culture – “Tom isn’t here. We really need Tom for this. We’re stuck until Tom returns.“
• Suboptimal project planning and forecasting
• Over-engineered solutions
• Individual contributors are spread between projects, forced to context switch more than should be acceptable
• Teams are too big, while roles are not well defined
• We could go on and on…

The point here isn’t to paint a negative picture but sometimes you just need to call it like it is. The sooner you can identify the problems, the closer you are to solutions. We operate according to Lean Thinking. It’s a mindset that drives us and we work hard to not only infuse it into our own culture, but to also influence our clients to think and operate at another level. Over the next few months, we will be be publishing a series that takes a closer look at Lean Thinking, the seven Lean Development Principles, and explore how these things can immediately make a positive impact on your business. Thank you for coming with us on this journey.