Downtime is the consequence of waste
It’s also acronym for 8 types of waste as defined by lean management. In IT some kinds of waste is hard to observe and measure as we don’t produce physical objects.
Defects
How many times client says “It’s not working” or “It’s not what I payed for”
- wrong priorities
- customer defects
- not compliant with documentation/manual
Follow-up questions
- How do we identify and minimize defects in our products?
- How often do we get feedback from the client?
- Do we offer clients our feedback?
- What is the quality and relevance of gathered data?
- What new qualities did we introduced after feedback from the client recently?
Overproduction
Doing too much, or ineffective work, lagging out delivery
- too many corner case
- manual work instead of automation
- too detailed documentation
Follow-up questions
- What is our delivery chain process?
- Do we understand and accept each step - what value does it bring to the product?
- What is our critical path?
- What would need to happen to make whole process faster?
Waiting
We try to multitask to avoid losing time, so we lose time on context switching later
- Sign of approval between “phases”
- External dependencies
- Decision-making meetings without action points
Follow-up questions
- In what ways do we collaborate in production process between teams?
- To what extent I can make relevant decisions for myself?
- What communication medium do we use?
Non-Unused talent
- Knowledge sharing
- Rigid division of roles in team
- Improvement forum
Transportation
- Continuous Integration and repository
- Build time
- Work in-between “built” and demo for customer
Motion
- Office space
- Access to information
- Collocation of team
- All roles needed to complete project in team
Extra-processing
- Unused artifacts (ie. build compiled on obsolete platform)
- Wrong (irrelevant) KPI
- Ineffective toolset