The 8 wastes of lean (use to be 7) and Kanban

The 8 wastes of lean (use to be 7) and Kanban

A while back I was teaching the 8 wastes of lean to my students, and when I got back to my hotel room I realised that I’m actually not implementing this in my daily life, daily routine. At that moment I started to change the way I think and do things, such as motion, waiting and non-utilised talent.

I made a conscious effort in relating myself and utilising the knowledge I have and implementing the awareness of the 8 wastes in my daily life.

Lets have a look at the 8 wastes;

1.    Defects – this is all about stopping rework, incorrect information, repaired or scraped work. This can be human error or machine. One thing to remember here that, its virtually impossible to eliminate this altogether, but what you can do is apply a better process.

2.    Overproduction – producing something before its needed or even producing more than necessary. In my experience when I was working as a junior developer, I found this trap very easy to fall into. You go above the scope and start adding a few extra features here and a few extra features there, thinking that the customer will like them, in reality you’re just over production what has been asked for.

3.    Waiting – wasting time, waiting around for the next step in a process, this can happen when there is a lack of knowledge, materials, or information. Basically, people can’t proceed with their work until another step has been completed. This is similar to bottlenecks. E.g. one department at its full capacity and another department waiting for them to complete the work before they can start.

4.    Non-utilised talent – underutilising people’s talents, skills and knowledge. For a moment I would like you to think about your own skills or your own organisation. This is where individuals have vast skills, knowledge, and experience but the company is not benefitting from these individuals. In all the years I have been working I have found this waste to be in many organisations.

5.    Transportation – unnecessary movement of products and materials. This is where value is decreased due to things being moved from one point to another. Transportation of resources increase costs, instead of moving materials unnecessarily, you can reorganise your physical space to simplify the process.

6.    Inventory – excess products and materials not being processed. Excess inventory is a major cause of additional cost. The major issue here is that with your inventory piling up it can hide other problems. Another major issue is when organisations or people hold on to excess inventory for their “just in case” or “we may need this in the future”, in such cases organisations and people often overstock on a certain product to meet unexpected customer demand. Excessive inventories often don’t meet customers’ needs and don’t add value. Ask yourself, have you ever bought or kept something that you may use it in the future and have never used that item?

7.    Motion – unnecessary movements by people. A good point I would like to make here is that stand in your kitchen and ask yourself, could I improve where everything is? So I can improve my motion? I remember once one of my students told me by just changing the route he would go home from work he saved 10 mins, now imagine if we added this extra saving time over a period of a year, how much time has he saved?

8.    Extra processing – more work, or higher quality than is required by the customer. This is quite common to happen when the work process is not organised well or there is a lack of documentation, or there are several ways getting to a certain point in time. The best way to protect yourself is to standardise the process by making some steps redundant.

Now lets see how we can implement these 8 wastes using a Kanban board.

1.    Looking at the board above, one of the important aspects people forget is to use and respect wip (work in progress) limits. Generally users think having a wip limit hinders the progress of the work, whereas, this stops a lot of multi tasking and forces people to concentrate on certain tickets, thus improving the overall flow. Adhering to wip limits actually helps reduce waste. The main issue with wip limits is RESPECT. Users on the board must respect these limits and adhere to them. The size of wip limits is not set in stone. You must evolve with them and carry out experiments to improve the overall flow.  From experience having wip limits stops extra processing and forces teams to think.

2.    Commitment point, having a commitment point on a Kanban board helps with “waiting” and “extra processing”. Here we will wait until the very last point before we commit to any work. After the user stories have passed the commitment point (red line), we as a team are fully committed to completing that work. Yes, there are occasions when we have to discard work that’s passed the commitment point, but this should be rare and tried to be avoided.

3.    Defects tracking. If I got paid ￡1 for every time, I have been asked this question I would be retiring. How do we track defects on a Kanban board? This is very easy and simple. The red tickets on the above example is a way you can track defects. A defect ticket could be further broken down to have the following: Dates, time, any dependencies, resolved etc.

4.    How do you manage motion? Grab a stopwatch; the moment a ticket moves past the commitment line (red line) the clock starts, this is called cycle time. This can continue until the item is deployed. At first when you hear the term “cycle time” it seems quite daunting, but in actual fact its very easy to calculate. END DATE – START DATE. There are many other calculations which we could carry out but that would be beyond the scope of this article. Using a Kanban board and observing how the tickets are moving along the board is another way at looking at the motion of the tickets.

5.    Waiting and non-utilised talent, on each ticket you can create an avatar, or have initials on a Kanban ticket stating which person is working on the ticket at that moment.  During Kanban meetings when working through the board; RIGHT to LEFT, the first discussions should be about; which tickets can we complete first, who is the best fit for this. REMEMBER:  stop starting and start finishing. If there are any dependencies which you’re waiting for; these can be annotated on a ticket e.g. you can have decorators highlighting any dependencies. (see  below for a simple example);

Conclusion;

A Kanban board, if used correctly can help a team minimise the 8 wastes which I have presented within this article. A Kanban board can help amongst many things; it can improve flow, cycle time, delivery, minimise dependencies etc. A Kanban board can also have deep and interesting conversations about which work needs to be completed next. Kanban is much more than a typical visual board of; TO DO, DOING, DONE. Like my favorite sport (boxing) there’s a lot of sweet science behind this!

Reference:

1.    Kanban, successful evolutionary change for your technology business (Blue book), Dave J Anderson.

2.    Kanban in action, Marcus Hammarberg & Joakim Sundén

3.    Eight wastes lean thinking, Sumeet Savant