The 8 Wastes – DOWNTIME

Regardless of the type of work being done – waste invades and quietly runs off with your profits. I initially wrote about 7 but recently reminded there was much more waste taking place. Adding an 8th waste to the mix makes an easy to remember acronym ‘DOWNTIME‘. There are many types of waste that can easily be applied to any business that contribute to Business Debt that can be associated with Technical Debt and/or Operational Debt. Here are the ones that you hear the most about and likely suffer from know it or not.

Waste	Description
Defects	Problems with quality tend to cause rework that you can ill-afford.
Overproduction	Doing more than was required or too much of something customer don’t really want.
Waiting	Delays between processing steps, blocking issues or supply chain issues.
Non-utilized Talent	Hiring the best but not utilizing them fully.
Transportation	Context switching or excess hand-offs between teams.
Inventory	Undelivered work or features.
Motion	Lost effort related to unnecessary movements by people or resources.
Extra processing	Adding unnecessary complexity or features.

When it comes to agile, value streams, and risk management waste can seriously impede the flow of value to customers and be costing you dearly. While you may not realize any or all of these wastes are lurking in your processes taking some time to go deeper and believe that improvements are possible will pay huge dividends.

Take Defects for example – sloppy code, failed widgets or unclear requirements result in disconnects that lead to extra processing. When dealing with code these manifest as bugs that could impact customers and ruin your reputation if ignored. Similarly, a percentage of incorrect widgets might require that they be set aside and possibly recycled hoping they are better next time around. A value stream map along with the right metrics will help you to see the cost of defects where they are introduced and collaboratively reveal some potential remedies to reduce or eliminate them.

In the case of Overproduction – agile methods could save your bacon by not doing more than the customer wanted or needed. The frequent incremental delivery of features to customers paired with feedback helps to shape the next steps which may not have been knowable at the beginning. This approach allows your team to pivot to the next most important thing which could be more polish or richness or fully switching gears to the next most important feature.

When it comes to Waiting – well that might just be the way it has always been done. Once again, a value stream map would likely reveal the waiting that takes place between steps and help establish some metrics to improve on as well as experiments with the process to eke out gains.

Transportation might seem like an odd choice of words and could be confused with physical Motion. Where Motion is a bit different and covers physical movement from one station to another, Transportation is more about excessive hand-offs and context switching which could be digital or even mental. It used to be that multi-tasking was a valued skill. However, recent research shows that multi-tasking is horribly inefficient and something to be avoided instead of cherished. Here you want to eliminate excess of either type in favor of focus and closing quickly with few movements or distractions.

I did not intend to explore the connection with each of these to business risk management. At this point it should be clear that waste comes in many forms and likely having a negative impact on your bottom line which is business risk.

Contact us to learn more about how we can leverage modern agility, flow engineering and other techniques that can eliminate waste in various forms that we adding to your Business Debt.

Additional Wastes to be aware of can impact performance:

Waste	Description
Communication	As in imprecise language or incorrect of terminology can cause small speed bumps at least and generate rework in the worst cases.
Culture Dynamics	A broken culture can cause significant problems. Beyond that though acquiring or being acquired can introduce conflict and confusion.
Planning	As in over planning or under planning.
Asset Management	Lost effort managing assets or tracking down misplaced or misused assets can cost a great deal of time and effort.
Onboarding	Not getting new hires properly onboarded can generate remorse and hinder their ability to hit the ground running. This concept also applies to spinning up new projects, acquisitions and more.