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Lean efficiencies

Agile and lean practices come with a warning triangle because, early on, the method works in such a way that it shows up problems, inefficiencies and deficiencies, whether they are recent additions or age-old problems. Older issues may have inefficient workarounds in place to alleviate the block or delay. At its extreme, these issues can lead to teams feeling like they are in a constant state of failure. As well as helping to identify these issues, agile and lean models work towards ironing out these problems and smoothing workflows. Raising awareness of the problems lean efficiencies provide a method to ensure they are addressed.

By using agile as an everyday management tool, this method ensures that future problems are visible early and, if identified quickly, they usually are easier to avoid, adapt to or solve.

Lean methods identify eight common wastes (see Figure 19.1). (The original seven wastes were identified by Toyota’s chief engineer, Taiichi Ohno and the eighth waste – of people or talent – is credited to Norman Bodek, who introduced lean to US manufacturing.) These eight wastes can be applied easily beyond manufacture to help identify opportunities to make savings and provide efficiencies in our work.

Talents

Businesses define their roles and responsibilities based on the needs of the business, which can result in underutilised talents, skills and knowledge within teams.

Empowering people to become self-organising and self-managing through agile structures and methods frees up individuals to focus on work where they add the most value, and utilise their talents to deliver great work that they enjoy.

Figure 19.1 Lean efficiencies

Trusting that those employed to do a job are the best people to know how to do that job is vital to ensuring that the skills and knowledge held within an organisation are used to its advantage. Traditional methods control and constrain people from excelling and developing in their careers, and can restrict the growth potential of an organisation.

Defects

A defect is an error or a fault that results in time being wasted, unexpected rework needed or, at worst, thrown away. The defect might be caused by wrong information, poor communication or an error, due to an insufficient standard of work.

Identifying defects and reducing their variability can help to improve productivity. Fixing the defect is not enough; the source of the problem should be found and addressed to ensure that the issue does not repeat itself.

If work is not being produced to the standard required, then there will be a reason for this. It could be a lack of skill or knowledge gap where training or better communication is needed.

The tools and materials needed may be difficult to source, or the time given to complete work may be insufficient. Initially, this may not be a major concern, but the problem may become compounded as more work is pushed into the pipeline, and blocks and delays begin to build until they are no longer workable and change is forced. Seeing these defects and blocks early means we can adapt more easily and quickly to resolve the issue.

By addressing these inefficiencies and deficiencies we can manage and resolve common defects, ensuring that work flows more evenly and without interruption.

Over-production

Over-production is doing too much, producing more than is needed, before it is needed, which can lead to waste and can create a bottleneck, if dependent activities cannot deal with increased volume.

What is produced should not be governed by how much can be produced but how much is needed and the capacity of dependent systems. Work should be delivered just in time, based on demand. By taking an iterative approach we can gauge better how much needs to be completed in order to meet demand. Therefore, output is generated just in time on demand.

Transportation

Transportation waste can be found in movement between people or places. Movement takes time and the less movement, the more quickly things can be achieved.

The time taken for movement between suppliers, partners and customers impacts upon delivery time and can lead to waiting times where activities are dependent on one another being available to progress.

Being aware of where movement impacts upon the workflow can help to identify more efficient ways of transferring between people and places, which helps to ensure consistency and capacity are maintained.

Communication technologies help to reduce transportation of people through tools such as video conferencing. This can save the time and costs associated with bringing people together and so make it easier and more viable to communicate and interact with others more regularly.

Waiting

Time spent waiting extends our timeline. We can look to multitask, reallocate resources, change our processes to reduce waiting times, and look for more efficient solutions that provide us with a quicker return.

The dashboards help to identify areas where work is held up from waiting on something else before it can be commenced, continued or completed. The waiting box and build-up of tasks within a stage are key flags to identify where waiting is causing delay.

If the pipeline of work is not sufficiently fed, later stages can become held up, and the problem can become compounded very quickly. A reallocation of resources to help regain balance within the pipeline is needed, either in the short term or permanently, to address the waiting time and reduce the amount of time wasted. Where waiting times cannot be reduced, processes need to be changed to take account of this issue and ensure that work is managed, so that waiting time is better utilised in the future.

Inventory

Inventory is the stock or resources that you have ready and waiting to be utilised. In manufacturing this refers to raw materials or finished products that are in storage rather than in motion.

Ideally, inventory should be available on demand, but high-value resources can be expensive to keep if they are not being utilised, and difficult to secure at short notice, so it is important to manage this appropriately to reduce cost wherever possible without impacting upon productivity and availability. Excess stock and work in progress can tie up valuable resources, space and cash that could lead to activity being limited in other areas.

Motion

This waste identifies the unnecessary motion that we undertake when we are working. This could be something as simple as walking back and forth to get something when it could be moved closer to your work area. Reducing the amount of motion needed within an activity helps to streamline the work and reduce the time needed to complete it.

Another form of motion that can impact our efficiency is the navigation of computing systems. The time it takes to navigate and retrieve information can impact upon our productivity. If information is difficult to find or slow to reach, then the number of clicks can be greatly increased. Think of the number of clicks you need to access a document and think of these as footsteps, as with physical movement; unnecessary motion within computer systems can impact hugely on the time it takes to complete a task.

Over-processing

Over-delivering, in terms of providing a higher quality of work than is required and budgeted for, is potential waste and can lead to the value created being decreased. Perfectionism is not always needed; the result needs to be good enough to satisfy only the requirements.

Over-processing and delivering can lead to expectations being raised beyond what is viable. If you always over-deliver, it will become expected and normal. This often becomes apparent if there is a reversion to what has been agreed contractually, where the customer can become unhappy quickly, as their expectations have been inappropriately raised.

There is also the theory of the law of diminishing returns, which suggests that there is a point at which the amount of benefit and value returned begins to reduce the more effort you put in. So there is an optimum balance between work undertaken and value delivered before the amount of effort to improve and refine further is in excess of the value that will be delivered from that effort.

By identifying the point at which the effort put in exceeds the value delivered, we can optimise our resources and outputs ensuring they are firstly viable and secondly deliver the best return on investment.

If the result is that the current effort does exceed the value created then the approach needs to be reviewed, so that it is justified as viable in some way, or an alternative more effective solution is identified that moves it from a negative to positive return.

We can take this further by combining this with the Pareto principle identified earlier which suggests that 20% of our effort returns 80% of the value. By combining the two we can identify and concentrate on the optimum percentage of our work that delivers the most value, and ensure that our work is as efficient as it can be to provide the greatest return on investment.

The Minimum Viable Product model identified earlier can be used to describe this optimum where the MVP is the optimum percentage of work to deliver a viable solution that satisfies the needs of the stakeholders and the value expected.

Agile and lean methods work to uncover and flag waste within your workflow so that you can identify them more easily and see opportunities to reduce waste and, in turn, create a faster and more balanced workflow that delivers the value needed just in time, at a standard that meets the requirements fully.

Workflow efficiencies

As the marketing lead for a conference, I am tasked with taking the raw video footage from the sessions, doing some basic edits and proofing and then publishing them on YouTube.

If you have ever edited video, even in the simplest format for online publishing, then you may already know that a 45-minute video will involve some unavoidable waiting-while-processing time, and watching time. Also, it can take half an hour to save and another half an hour to upload. Then there is time for editing and adding links and details to the website, and notifying speakers’ time, so it is an average two-hour job in total for each video. Multiply that by 40 and you will have an estimate of the time I need to commit to this job: 80 hours’ work. My time to do this is voluntary, so I need to fit it in between a full-time job and my social life. It is not something I can simply spend two weeks on, like it is a full-time job. I needed to be smarter, leaner and faster.

So, I did a number of things. I reduced the overall time needed by working in batches. I could only edit and save one video at a time, but I could be uploading one to the internet and working on another concurrently. This reduced my estimates of time by multitasking during waiting time. Working in batches and pulling the next video into the workflow, I could work on multiple videos at once.

After my experience of editing 25 videos over three days in the previous year, I was sure that I did not want to take that approach again. But I had learnt, by doing the work as a continuous work in progress, that multi tasking on multiple videos I could process, efficiently and sanely, four videos in around three hours. This efficiency reduced my time commitment from 80 to 30 hours, but still 4 solid days of video processing was not sustainable or viable, given my existing workload.

So, I used sprints to break up the work into sets of four videos in three-hour blocks of time that I would complete in the evenings and at weekends, as time allowed. I could then estimate that I would be able to complete the work in five weeks with two blocks per week.

I was able to set the expectations of the conference attendees about when the videos were likely to be available, and it enabled me to provide a continuous flow of videos over the course of the month after the conference, rather than all at once. From a marketing perspective, this extended our visibility and interaction with our followers and built anticipation for videos that were later in the publishing list.

The process of using an agile approach, and mapping the task on a board, helped me to see the most efficient and agreeable approach to processing the videos. It reduced the pressure I had put upon myself the previous year to complete the process, which had been stressful; it made it more enjoyable and brought about benefits that had not been previously considered. Benefits included drip-feeding the content, which led to extended interaction through social media and email communications and, therefore, increased impressions and visibility during the month. This, in turn, led to a number of additional registrations for tickets for the following year that had not been seen in previous years’ sales statistics.

It also allowed me to test and estimate the length of time it would take to process the videos. The conference contained a number of workshop-type sessions, which contained periods of group activity. These videos took longer to edit, as they needed to be watched fully and timings found for cutting the workshop activity from the footage for improved viewing. This meant that some videos took longer than estimated. Another bottleneck was viewing the videos to establish the editing needed. Through natural improvement I was able to adopt a method of scan proofing each session in around half the time of the running time of the video.

From speaker interaction, feedback from attendees and discussions with the conference team, I was able to find out which videos were likely to need editing and proofing more than others, and which were likely to need minimal editing and so could be processed almost immediately. By reviewing my activity, I was able to optimise flow and identify constraints where I needed to become leaner. There is an amazing resource of agile videos at www.agileonthebeach.com. I highly recommend you have a look!