The Toyota Way – Types of Wastes – IT industry

The very first piece, I wish to clear the misconception that, the Lean management is applicable for Manufacturing. No beloved readers! It is not true; the Lean management can be applied in any industry even in the personal events.

Let’s see the type of mistakes that are mostly applied, experienced in the IT industry, referring to Lean Management genre.

1) Overproduction

This can be termed effectively as faster than the necessary pace. Specifically, in the Business analysis, the faster inferring the solution without validating the assumptions, specifications will havoc and down run the entire project life cycle.

Overproduction (Faster than the necessary pace) is observed in all the project life cycle.

2) Waiting

The Business analysis activities are completed, and development were not started due to various reasons.

I would say this as proper fitment of pipeline. If there is spills in the pipeline in movement of activities, the efforts are required to re-order/ re-align. It should not be over production / under production.

3) Conveyance

In IT industry, there is not any physical movement of goods. In orderly, it is the communication to the relevant stakeholders at the right time at right mode of communication.

Choosing irrelevant stakeholders will obstruct the actual response required. This looks simple but it is the real hero for the project life.

4) Processing

The poor layout of the processing standards, approvals, communications etc., will not only derail the project, will affect the morale, and will have the ripple effect for the overall organization's.

In the new era, the decisions power and accountability to spread across the horizontal functions to take swift decisions. Time is the superior power my friend.

5) Excess Stock

Excess stock of the resources in a delivery which is not an actual requirement will engage you in poor planning. This is the additional planning strategies, excessive dependencies will result in greater lead time.

6) Correction of Mistakes

This is the biggest enemy of the IT Organization's.

Correcting a single error, the error may be process or the development errors will involve more efforts on the actual developments. Manifesto that shall engage is Fail Fast and Fail Cheap.

Here comes, the solution should be scalable and interoperable.

I tried to list out the common examples of the above mistakes, there could be multiple examples for each mistake that has most impacts in the projects.

Thanks for reading. Requesting to fill in all the common mistakes and the lesson learnt may help other readers to leverage your experiences.