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Eliminating Waste: Seeing is Believing
Waste is one sneaky fellow.
I think we can all agree that eliminating waste is one of the best things we can do for our organizations. And luckily for us, we have many modern tools that help us do just that. Kanban boards enable us to spot bottlenecks so we can place work-in-progress (WIP) limits. Root cause analysis techniques help us dig deeper beyond surface level problems. And cumulative flow diagrams (CFDs) allow us to see how well we’re managing flow. But despite our best attempts to search and destroy, waste still somehow manages to sneak on in.
Out of Sight, Out of Mind
This is why seeing waste is singled out as a “thinking tool” in Lean software development. To eliminate waste, we need to see it first. To review, waste — or muda in Japanese — in Lean is anything that’s non-value adding. Basically, anything in your workflow that doesn’t contribute to bringing value to your customers or organization can be considered waste. Kanban and CFDs are invaluable in that they make waste very visible and easy to point out, especially in the context of the entire system. And root cause analysis techniques like the five whys can make us realize that we were focusing on the wrong thing.
However, in order to see the big picture to optimize the whole (another Lean principle), you need the full…
