This is the slide deck from my talk at LESS 2012, the Lean Enterprise Software and Systems conference in Tallinn, Estonia.
http://SystemAgility.com/events
2. Do any of these sound familiar?
• Discovering the same problems over and over again
• Solving the same problems repeatedly
• Discovering that the problem we thought we had
was just a symptom
• Teams are not performing to expectation (either
managements or their own)
• Things just seem to take too long to get done
• There is a lot of churn
• Defect rates are climbing
• Feature velocity is falling over successive releases
• People are feeling a general dissatisfaction and lack
of fulfillment
3. About me
• My day job
§ Co-Founder, Agile Office at Cisco
§ Internal Agile & Lean Consultant
• Extra-curricular activities
§ Fellow of the Lean Systems Society (http://LeanSystemsSociety.org/)
§ Award-winning publications in Agile and Lean product development
§ Frequent speaker at major international Agile and Lean conferences
§ Involved in organizing international Agile and Lean conferences
§ Industry/academic collaborative research on Agile and Lean software
development
§ Blog: http://SystemAgility.com/
§ Twitter: @ken_power
4. “Eliminating waste is the most
fundamental lean principle, the one
from which all the other principles
follow. Thus, the first step to
implementing lean development is
learning to see waste.”
(Poppendieck and Poppendieck 2003)
5. Defining Waste
• Waste
• “Waste is anything that depletes resources of time,
effort, space, or money without adding customer
value.”
• Unevenness
• Variability in Flow
• Overburden
• “Unreasonableness”
6.
7. • Waste of overproduction.
7 Wastes of
TPS • Waste of time on hand
Ohno (waiting).
Shiego
• Waste in transportation.
• Waste of processing itself.
• Waste of stock on hand
(inventory)
• Waste of movement.
• Waste of making defective
products.
8. Capacity and Efficiency
Present Capacity = Work + Waste
“True efficiency comes when
we produce zero waste and
bring the percentage of work
to 100 percent”
(Ohno 1988)
9. • Overproduction.
8 Wastes of • Waiting (time on hand).
Lean
Liker • Unnecessary transport or
conveyance.
• Over-processing or incorrect
processing.
• Excess inventory.
• Unnecessary movement.
• Defects.
• Unused employee creativity.
10. Waste Type Examples of Waste Effects of Waste
Overproduction • Producing items for which there are no orders • Overstaffing; Storage costs;
Transportation costs
Waiting (time on • Workers watching an automated machine • Worker time is wasted
hand) • Workers standing around waiting for the next
processing step, tool, supply part, etc.
• Workers having no work because stock is out of
supply, delays in processing, equipment downtime,
or capacity bottlenecks
Unnecessary • Carrying work in progress long distances • Time is wasted
transport or • Creating inefficient transport
conveyance • Moving materials, parts or finished goods into or
out of storage or between processes
Over-processing • Unneeded extra steps to process parts • Inefficiencies; Unnecessary work
or incorrect • Inefficient processes
processing • Providing higher quality than necessary
Excess inventory • Excess raw material • Production imbalance; Late deliveries
• Excess Work In Progress (WIP) from suppliers; Defects; Equipment
• Extra inventory down time; Long setup time;
Obsolescence; Damaged goods; Excess
transportation costs; Excess Storage
Costs
Unnecessary • Any wasted motion employees have to perform in • Excess time, delayed feedback, or
movement the course of their work, e.g., looking for, reaching opportunity for errors
for or stacking tools, parts, etc.
Defects • Production of defective parts • Wasteful handling, time and effort
• Correction of defective parts
• Repair or rework; Scrap
• Replacement production; Inspection
Unused employee • Not engaging with or listening to employees • Lost time, ideas, skills, improvements,
creativity and learning opportunities
11. Wastes in Software Development
The Seven Wastes of The Seven Wastes of Software
Manufacturing Development
• Inventory • Partially Done Work
• Extra Processing • Extra Processes
• Overproduction • Extra Features
• Transportation • Task Switching
• Waiting • Waiting
• Motion • Motion
• Defects • Defects
12. Waste elimination and continuous
improvement applies even more to
high-performing teams and
organizations
13.
14. Waste comes back
20 years later, it’s striking to me how much effort we’ve expended on eliminating
muda (waste) and how little attention we have given to mura (unevenness) and
muri (overburden).
In short, unevenness and overburden are now the root causes of
waste in many organizations. Even worse they put
waste back
that managers and operations teams have just
eliminated.
I have … advice for managers — especially senior managers — trying to create
lean businesses: Take a careful look at your mura and your muri as you start to
tackle your muda.”
James Womack, “Mura, Muri, Muda?” in Gemba Walks
17. Challenges
• Agreeing what is “waste”
• Visualize Waste
• Quantify the effects and impacts of Waste
• E.g., Technical Debt, Quality Debt
• Quantify the (perceived improvements) of managing the
Wastes
• Seeing the whole – Systems Thinking
• Avoiding local sub-optimization
• Some focus on Muda
• Little focus on the effects of
• Mura (unevenness in operations)
• Muri (overburdening of people and equipment)
19. Identifying Wastes using Games
Keep Doing
Do Less Of
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
Do More Of
Things to Try
!
Stop Doing
http://innovationgames.com
http://skycoach.be/
20. PDSA
• Follows the steps of the
Scientific Method Act Plan
• Plan: develop a hypothesis or
experiment
• Do: conduct the experiment
• Study: collect measurements
• Act: interpret the results and
take appropriate action
• Also known as Study Do
• PDCA
• The Deming Cycle
• The Shewart Cycle
22. A3 Management
Focus Problem Solving Proposal Writing Project Status Review
Thematic content or Improvements related to Policies, decisions, or Summary of changes
focus quality, cost, delivery, projects with significant and results as an
safety, productivity, etc. investment or outcome of either
implementation problem solving or
proposal implementation
Tenure of person Novice, but continuing Experienced personnel; Both novice and more
conducting the work throughout career managers experienced managers
Analysis Strong root-cause Improvement based on Less analysis and more
emphasis; quantitative/ considering current focus on verification of
analytical state; mix of quantitative hypothesis and action
and qualitative items
PDCA cycle Document full PDCA Heavy focus on the Plan Heavy focus on the
cycle involved in making step, with Check and Act Check and Act steps,
an improvement and steps embedded in the including confirmation of
verifying the result implementation plan results and follow-up to
complete the learning
loop
From Table 5.1 from “Understanding A3 Thinking”
25. Waste Waste Description Relative # Value Trigger Date, Relative Relative
Example Category Importance Stakeholders by which the value for value for
affected waste must managing managing
be this waste this waste
eliminated vs. other vs. other
wastes Project work
Compile and Waiting It can take We are losing 42 Devs, 12 50+ people Release 4.5.1 This will help This will
Build times 15-30 nearly 20 QA (directly will have less in August reduce ultimately
take too long minutes to person-hours affected – frustration 2012 feedback help us go
run a full per day others are waiting for loops and faster with
build, across the indirectly long build encourage other project
depending on entire team. affected) cycles; more use of work
the machine Shorter build TDD, leading
cycles to higher
encourage quality, fewer
more frequent integration
integration … errors, fewer
defects
Team spends Partially Done Engineers, We are not 8 Devs, 3 QA, The entire
time working Work designers and doing 2 Eng Mgr, 2 team can
on features others are sufficient due Product Mgr spend more
that get putting diligence on time focusing
dropped significant some on delivering
effort into features. We features we
features that need to get will ship with.
get dropped better at
later. defining our
Minimal
Viable Offer.
Duplication of Extra Functional Duplicated 4 Eng. Mgr, 1
status and Processes lines are effort and Program Mgr,
progress managing danger of 3 Team Leads
reporting own reporting mixed
message
Resolving Defects
defects in
complex
product
dependency
chains
26. Effective Retrospectives
• One of the top 10
reasons that Agile
projects fail is poor use
of retrospectives
• Your opportunity to
Inspect and Adapt
• Foster organization
learning
Org
People Team Management
Leadership
30. Getting Ready and Done
Definition of Done and
Definition of Ready act as
social contracts in agile teams.
Together, they provide a
boundary that stabilizes the
team’s working environment,
prevents waste (time, delays,
churn, working on the wrong
things), and avoids the Let nothing into a Sprint (or
accumulation of technical debt Timebox) that is not Ready; Let
and quality debt. nothing out that is not Done
31. Planned Ready In Progress Done Accepted
(5)
This is our Ready
policy. Thanks for
reading.
Apply WIP Limits to the
Ready Queue too
Explicit Policies:
We have prepared the Definition of Ready is a
Work Item, and the Work good fit here
Item is ready to be pulled
in by the team
32. Waste and Software Debt
Features&
Technical&Debt&
Quality&Debt&
Release&1& Release&2& Release&3& Release&4&
Features&
“Technical Debt Is Now Technical&Debt&
Costing Us $3.61 Per Line Of Quality&Debt&
Code”
- CAST Study
Release&1& Release&2& Release&3& Release&4&
Power, Ken. “Product Ownership Challenges.”
34. Waste and Flow
“The Principle of Queuing Waste:
Queues are the root cause of the
majority of economic waste in
product development”
(Reinertsen, 2009).
35. Kanban helps visualize and control waste
“kanban systems offer deferred commitment,
control of variability in flow, elimination of
over-burdening, reduction of multi- tasking,
and better alignment with high level risk
management decisions regarding allocation of
supply against various competing demands”
(Anderson, 2012)
What Kanban Coaches do and don’t do
http://agilemanagement.net/index.php/Blog/what_kanban_coaches_do_and_dont_do/
36. The Life of a User Story
Planned Ready In Progress Done Accepted
(10) (5) (7)
This is our Ready This is our Ready
policy. Thanks for policy. Thanks for
reading. reading.
A single “In Progress” queue is not always
sufficient to see what is happening
37. The Life of a User Story
Planned Ready In Progress Done Accepted
(10) (5)
Analysis Design Design Coding Code Test SCM
Review Review Updates
(2) (1) (2) (2) (1)
40. What would Deming say?
“In my experience, most troubles and
most possibilities for improvement
add up to proportions something like
this:
94% belong to the System (the
responsibility of management)
6% belong to Special Causes”
41. Optimize on the People who add Value
“Almost every organization claims it’s
people are important, but if they truly
optimize their structures on those who add
value, they would be able to say:”
42. For all our vaunted efficiency in the making of
things, our economy is still incredibly wasteful.
This waste comes not from the inefficient
organization of work but rather from working on
the wrong things – and on an industrial scale. …
It is hard to come by a solid estimate of just how
wasteful modern work is.”
• Eric Ries, The Lean Startup. (page 274)
43. Summary
• There is waste in every • Use these techniques as
system part of your Continuous
• Learn to see it Improvement (Kaizen)
• Eliminate it (or at least get it under efforts
control)
• Release or Iteration Retrospectives
• Develop people to be are a great forum
Problem Solvers • Dedicated Problem Solving
Sessions
• You can have fun finding • Continuous Improvement Circles
and eliminating waste • Strategy Sessions
• use serious games at work • Portfolio Management Sessions
• Whenever you encounter a
problem
• Keep it Visible