May 2018 – John Yorke

What is Waste?

First of all the statement makes it sound like waste is bad, in fact the word does seem to imply that waste is bad. However, Lean is a lot less emotive with the term, Lean is often confused and simplified into simply the reduction/removal of waste. But this is a very lazy and incorrect interpretation.

Lean is about productivity first and foremost, and is about reducing ‘waste’ ONLY when AND if doing so does not impact the system productivity. In other words, in Lean ‘waste reduction’ is far less important than system improvement, but for whatever reason we get hung up on waste – especially when bashing others. We reduce waste to improve the system – waste reduction is not our goal it is just a tool to help us.

Is Estimation waste?

Is Estimation waste? The short answer is yes, but that is only part of the truth. Lean considers waste to be activities that do not directly add value to your product and can be considered either ‘Necessary Waste’ or ‘Pure Waste’.

Waste covers a whole host of things, but waste includes: Planning, testing, reporting, breaks, vacation, sickness, and a great deal of other things far too many to mention.

So calling Estimation ‘waste’ is akin to calling Planning ‘waste’, if we were to eliminate say planning and testing in an effort to reduce waste, we would very likely cause more and worse waste by producing the wrong thing (over production waste), in the wrong order(over production), or poor quality (rework waste).

In other words not all waste is bad and not all waste should be removed – simply calling something ‘waste‘ does not help the conversation.

Sometimes a little waste now can save a lot of waste later.

Is it beneficial?

The real question is whether the activity helps the system? and as a follow-up, is there a better way of achieving the same thing?

Questions to ask when considering waste:

Does this activity help the system to be productive now and in the future? (Would removing it impact our productivity)

Is there a better was to achieve the same outcome?

I can’t answer the question of whether Estimation is beneficial in your system, because every system is unique, if you are using estimation for forecasting purposes then I’d suggest that there may be alternative solutions that are better and #NoEstimates may be a good place to start. But forecasting is only one use of an estimate, your system may find that estimates are beneficial it is for you to decide.

Next time you see someone use blanket statements that eliminating ‘waste’ as an absolute and unqualified justification for not doing something, please challenge them to qualify their statement. Remember that waste is often necessary, our goal is more often to improve or understand the wasteful activity rather than eliminate it entirely.

Over the years I have discovered that the more I learn on any subject the more I come to realize that I know very little, it doesn’t seem to matter how much I study or how much I learn, the awareness of scope of my ignorance grows far faster. Does that make me wise or just aware that I know very little? I suspect that I’m slowly fighting my way out of the valley of despair.

No need to improve

One of the most challenging aspects of being an Agile Coach and working with teams is that to improve you first need to accept that there is room to improve. There are a some teams and team members that believe there is nothing more that they need to learn, they are so supremely confident in their own capability and knowledge that they refuse to consider that there could be a better way to do things than the way they have always done things.

On the other-hand I can’t be confident that there is a better way, only that we won’t find a better way unless we look. I don’t like the notion there is a ‘best practice’ as this limits our thinking. But this puts unwavering certainty that this is the ‘best practice’ against encouragement to explore the possibility of a better way, certainty is very powerful.

Sometimes this ‘certainty’ is founded in fear, especially when dealing with transformations where former roles are called into question, I find this an understandable reaction, but the situations I struggle with most are the team members that become blinkered to opportunities, they have found one way that works (even poorly) and simply are unwilling to try anything different. Their Ego, prevents them considering anything else.

As a coach I have no desire to force processes or ideas on people, only to open their minds that there could be opportunities and alternatives. So it can be heartbreaking when people refuse to even consider alternatives, or worse impose their views on others through sheer force of will.

Perhaps I am mistaken and maybe the right answer is that if something isn’t broke don’t fix it, but that notion doesn’t sit well with me.

So how do we persuade people to open themselves up to learning new things?

I recently had an experiences that I found tough, there was a QA who refused to ‘leave his column’ on the board, he would not do anything that was not ‘testing’ and resisted anyone working with him in ‘his column‘ thankfully it is not often I see that level of obstinance. But this situation was further compounded by the rest of the team enabling his behavior. The developers were all too happy not to be involved with the QA aspect and were seemingly unmoved by his unwillingness to cross boundaries.

The QA column was regularly a bottleneck but rather than addressing this the team wanted to mask the issue by pushing cards through and raising new cards for rework. What was tough was that the team saw no need to experiment with alternative ways of working: suggestions included either helping the QA, or even getting the QA involved earlier, and despite raising QA as a bottleneck repeatedly in retrospectives the team didn’t want to change behavior even in the form of an experiment.

As a coach you can shine a light but not force a change. I felt the team was capable of far more but the team were getting things done and were seemingly content with the status quo. For me this is the dark side of coaching, where you must watch a team not reach their potential, out of respect for their independence. Ultimately it is a trust issue as things so often are.

Ownership of Columns

In general I dislike explicit roles when there is a shared responsibility, and I dislike the notion that a column on a board is in anyway related to a person or a specific role, the board should reflect the progress of the work (stories) not ownership of the work and when the two become muddled people become defensive and territorial.

When there becomes an association between a column and a person the focus moves from getting a story done as a team, to moving a story on to the next column, we switch our context of efficiency to a narrower view.

This is often seen as a subtle and unimportant distinction. But when the team loses a cohesive sense of ownership for getting to done and can hand off responsibility to another sub section of the team, bad habits emerge. At it’s worst I have seen teams (thankfully not one I coached) where at stand-up one part of the team will brag about how many stories they are ahead of an other part (be it front and back end or Dev and QA). In one extreme case I saw a team decouple testing from development by splitting stories and I overheard one standup where the developers were gleeful that they were now 3 sprints ahead of testing (the sprints were 3-week sprints). It is 9 weeks before they will see value from their work or even know if their work had value, and yet they were so proud.

Dunning Kruger Effect

Adjusting your mindset to one of learning rather than certainty can be tough, especially for those that grew up in a culture that rewards confidence and certainty, but accepting that you don’t know everything and being aware that there is always the potential to improve can enable you to become far more capable, the only thing stopping you is your ego.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

Bertrand Russell

Month: May 2018

Estimation is waste?