DevOps and Waste

Developer Support

September 21st, 20180 0

In this post, consultant Ron Vincent discusses the notion of eliminating waste in our processes — why it’s important and how to find and eliminate waste in daily activities.

As I discussed in my previous blog on DevOps and Leadership, Lean started out in the Toyota Production System because Taiichi Ohno wanted to be able to deliver cars to the customer as quickly as possible. His notion of doing this was to eliminate waste. To Ohno, however, waste has a special meaning. It means anything that does not add value to the customer. According to Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit, “A part that is sitting around waiting to be used is waste. Making something that is not immediately needed is waste. Motion is waste. Transportation is waste. Waiting is waste. Any extra processing steps are waste. And of course defects are waste.” Think about that for a moment and think about all the activities your organization does on a daily basis.