Seeing and eliminating waste

Quality is solving problems, every day, permanently. Daily problem solving is continuous improvement. Continuously improving …. what? What concrete thing improves when we solve problems?

Customers pay for value. When we solve problems we increase value.

The opposite of adding value to the customer is problems. If we know what problems look like then, surely, we will get better at solving them, and therefore delivering value?

Taiicho Ono, Chief Engineer at Toyota, found seven opposites to customer value, so we don’t have to re-invent them. He called them waste.

• Transport – moving what we build around. Knowledge, information, code and decisions are our work in progress, and the movement from one head to another, one machine or environment to another are transport.

• Inventory – storing what we are building without working on it. Our inventory is things like the BRD and FS, accumulating information before it is used by developers and testers.

• Motion – the movements each of us make, from reaching for the mouse to travelling to another office. Finding information fits into this category.

• Waiting – for a review to be done, for a defect to be fixed, for the sponsor to make a decision are our obvious waiting wastes. There are many more.

• Over-production – building more functionality than the customer needs right now.

• Over-processing – doing more work than is necessary to add value.

• Defects – delivering gaps between expected and actual customer expectations into production, passing incomplete requirements to the developers, designing tests that do not measure what the customer needs are obvious defects.

When Taiichi san went looking for these wastes he distinguished between three levels of activity: Maximise, Optimise and Eliminate.

His definition of Maximise was extreme. “Functionality delivered into capable hands” could be his opinion of the value that IT projects deliver. Eliminating all else then becomes the goal.

Maximise is useful in that it provides a clear focus for what we do and it is the stretch goal whenever we think about how we can improve.

The two other levels provide a balance to this extreme category. Eliminate is for pure waste, activities that add absolutely no value. Just stop doing those and nobody will worse off. This is the best kind of problem to solve, and the easiest, once you are certain that nobody will be affected.

Optimise is where we can most usefully focus our problem solving energy. These activities are necessary to support the maximise activities, but do not directly add value themselves. They must be made as efficient and effective as possible, with the ultimate goal of eliminating them.