Eliminate waste

Motivation

Waste is the result of activities or environmental conditions that prevent a team from reaching its goal. That clearly can't be good, so you need to get rid of it.

Applicability

Waste manifests itself in many different ways. It's way easier to find processes that produce waste, than to find processes that don't produce any waste at all. So just consider this one to be applicable in all circumstances.

Application

In order to eliminate waste:

Waste, and its underlying causes, have to be detected and identified.

Changes to the work environment need to be made to both eliminate the cause of the waste and the waste itself

One of the approaches that may help eliminating waste is value stream mapping:

Value stream mapping is one particular tool that can be used by a team or organization to identify wasteful activities. The team describes the amount of time that work takes to go through each activity in their overall work process. Next, the team determines if each activity adds value or does not add value to the end goal. All activities are subject to speed improvements, and activities that do not add value are subject to elimination.

Consequences

There is a lot of value in reducing waste:

  • Frustration ↘
  • Productivity ↗
  • Creativity ↗
  • Speed ↗
  • Delivery of value ↗
  • Reduce defects ↗

References

  1. Eliminate Waste

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