The “W” Campaign
The “W” Campaign
Take a look at the cards on your team’s board. Which tasks your team does in this iteration actually add value for your Product Owner? How many are done to meet regulatory or end customer needs? How many are done that don’t add value to the customer? How many of the tasks are repetitious and manual? What tasks have artificial delays built into them?
We know there are many tasks in every team that are non value add. That’s why we are starting the W Campaign. We are asking teams, your teams, to identify waste (non value add activities) in the software development process, and help enable the company to remove it. So if you have a task on the board that is waste, grab a red marker, and write a red W on it. After your team has reviewed your board and put red W’s on the waste, invite your product owner, and team’s stakeholders to discuss the waste. Ask management to remove it, politely, but insistently. Removing waste and continually improving processes are highly effective value add activities managers are uniquely positioned to do. Teams go faster when waste is removed. Team members are happier when they can focus on adding value. Below are some ideas for recognizing the seven forms of waste in your software development process. If you are not sure it is waste, discuss it with your team members or product owner.
The seven wastes of software development1
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Partially done work – Partially done development ties up resources in investment that has yet to yield a result. Minimizing work in process is a risk reduction as well as a waste reduction strategy. |
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Extra processes – Did you ever ask, is all that paperwork necessary? Do three groups really add value reviewing that report? A good test of the value of paperwork is to see if there is someone waiting to use what will be produced to add additional customer value. There should be a constant search for the most efficient, effective means to transmit the information. |
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Extra features – It may seem like a good idea to put some extra features into a system “just in case” however this is a serious addition of waste. Every bit of code in the system has to be tracked, compiled, integrated, and tested every time the system is changed. It increases complexity and is a potential failure point. It may become obsolete before its used, and may be removed or changed before it is ever used. |
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Task switching – Assigning people to multiple projects or teams is a source of waste. Every time a person switches between projects, there is significant loss of productive time as they get into the flow of the other work. The fastest time to complete projects is to do them one at a time. |
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Waiting – One of the biggest wastes in software development is usually waiting for things to happen. Delays in starting, staffing and onboarding, reviews and approvals, testing, and deployment are waste. When critical customer need, like a defect arrives in you’re your organization, the speed at which you can respond is directly related to the systemic delays in your development cycle. |
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Motion – When a tester or analyst asks a question, how much motion does it take to find out the answer? Each hand off of artifacts: code, documentation, tests, etc. between team members is full of waste. Moving artifacts from one team or project to another is a huge source of waste. The waste is that handoffs and their artifacts don’t, and can’t contain all of the information a person needs to know. Documents are low bandwidth, and require lots of interpretation, which takes time and generates assumptions and errors. Face to face communication is high bandwidth, the interaction allows assumptions to be checked and greatly reduces the amount of interpretation required. |
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Defects – The amount of waste caused by a defect is the product of the defect impact and the time it goes undetected. The way to reduce the impact of defects is to find them as soon as they occur. To reduce defect waste, the team must test immediately, integrate often, and release to production as soon as possible. |
Learning to see waste is an ongoing process of changing the way you think about what is really necessary.
1. Lean software development, Tom and Mary Poppendieck, pp. 4-8.
1 Response to “The “W” Campaign”
[...] One of the key factors in lean agile is eliminating waste. Several SCRUM colleagues started The ‘W’ Campaign to eliminate waste. So do something good for your organization today, find one source of waste and [...]