waste

The Best Way To Shutdown The Org

The Best Way To Shutdown The Org

damirprusac

rulesLet’s talk about rules!
In the big organization, but also a small one, rules are important part of structuring the operations and impose behaviors. Sometimes they are also called policies, directives, orders, requests, guidelines, instructions… All of them have a common purpose to streamline and channel actions to have predictable outcomes that produce a sense of control. They help to comply with legal or company’s regulations.
This is OK.
Nevertheless, let’s be a bit critical!

One characteristic of rules is that they often generalize, i.e. aim to cover wide as much as possible and make people acting similarly. In that case, different needs have to compromise[1] (and sub-optimize) accordingly. To take a blunt example: when company wants to reduce travel costs, every department has a percentage to reduce. For customer support and deployment department that would release a bit of pressure of traveling to customers… and will cause slow deployment … and sales (being cynical on purpose here).

The second characteristic of rules is the source and ownership. Management (middle management) is responsible to apply and execute rules, while usually the Human Resources department (and higher management) create them. Well, somebody needs to do it and it needs to make sure about their execution compliance. One “happy hour” example is the working hours policy – well known helper in the SW industry (tell programmers to work from 09-17h).

The third characteristic is that rules are limiting. More rules means more limitations and borders which kills creativity and reduce a need to communicate. It boxes us into our area of responsibility and expertise thus creating the place to locally optimize a part of operations on the account of the whole flow. It creates a need to well specify, document and handover a part of work under our responsibility which is a pretty accurate definition of waste – please see the post about it!

The fourth characteristic of rules is their age. They have tendency to stick and stay as long as the management that created them is there to influence their life-cycle. It goes even beyond…:-(

The next characteristic is the heaviest one and is a consequence of the previous: rules create a conformance culture which goes against continuous improvement and innovative mindset.

The next characteristic… perhaps it’s enough!

The following quote well illustrates where the company following the rules is heading to:

If you want to shut down an org, the best way is for people to stop working. The 2nd best way is for everyone to just follow the rules.

[1] By definition a compromise is the worst solution.
Let’s Talk About Waste

Let’s Talk About Waste

damirprusac

I like the pure lean definition of waste – Anything that does not add value to the customer, full stop.
We might argue about it…it would simply be a waste!

In the book: “Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit” by Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck, waste in SW development is defined as everything besides analysis and coding with the following categories:

  • Partially Done Work
  • Extra Processing
  • Extra Features
  • Task Switching
  • Waiting
  • Motion
  • Defects

Some thinkers would add one more category on top of the list – a waste of unused human talent.
This is the moment were leaders come into the game. Unused talent or “idle brain” is the situation either when nothing useful or something wasteful is done.

Analysis of Performed Activities

On the (quite old) figure shown, there is a ratio between value added and non value added activities in a typical organization.

As seen from the figure a large part of the process and activities may appear in a form that our customer would not be willing to pay for. However, those activities are built into the final price of the product that we sell making it less competitive than it should be. We tend to focus on increasing efficiency of the small green part and ignore a big pool of wasteful activities with the color that irritates bulls. Losing energy, time and resources with the red part completely shadow the efficiency gain on the green part.

There are strong indications that with the system thinking focusing to optimize the whole production chain, about 50% of the red part can be eliminated.

Non-Value Added Activities

 

The non-value added part is usually a big legacy part of activities, process, methods, tools and culture that cannot be changed over night. It also cannot and should not be terminated all together. There are activities that are perhaps not adding any value, but still needed to maintain and execute the operations of the organization.

By eliminating wasteful work (a pure waste) and minimizing actions that do not generate value, but are still needed due to different reasons, we maximize a value added work. So let’s relentlessly learn how to see and expose any type of waste. That’s what continuous improvement is about in a large extend.