Visualising Waste with Lego
Introduction
Have you ever started your day with a checklist of things to do only to find that 6 pm hits and you haven’t gotten a single thing done? When you think back on your day you realise it’s not that you were lazy; you were actually very busy. But thinking back to your original list for the day makes you feel as if you didn’t accomplish anything. This may be down to waste.
Waste was a term originally developed by Toyota to describe any activity that doesn’t add value, is unnecessary for the customer and incurs extra costs/resources. By creating this term, the company was able to gear their workforce’s mindset towards identifying and eliminating any excess that was not absolutely needed, thereby facilitating a lean manufacturing process.
Waste cannot only be found in the manufacturing industry. In the workplace there are unfortunately tons of potential interruptions that could be getting in the way of completing that list of goals for the day.
As Toyota experienced, to eliminate this type of waste it’s important to first give it a name and identify all actions that would be included under this category. While in an assembly line it may be easy to identify what’s taking more or less time, in a team this is all based on each individual’s daily experience and work style. Rather than simply analyzing the steps that go into each sprint or goal period, it’s necessary to facilitate a discussion around what the team considers to be ‘waste’ and how it’s impacting their goal completion.
To do this we conducted an experiment within our development team. With LEGOs.
Overview
We used legos to visualise waste during 1 sprint. Every day each person would fill a grey rectangle with 8 spaces representing 1 hour each. As a team, we started by discussing which activities — whether necessary or unnecessary — may be hindering their productivity. In the end, we chose 6 different lego colours to represent the following:
- White: Sprint Work
- Red: Meetings
- Green: Notifications
- Yellow: Others
- Blue: In person interruptions
- Orange: Prepwork
This exercise had two major goals:
- See if the exercise brought value and could be brought to the wider team
- Observe if anything during the sprint was a major distractor or not.
Every day, each person would fill a grey rectangle with 8 spaces representing each 1 hour. Over the course of one 2-week sprint, this is how it looked like for our team:
As we can see, no-one had the same sort of week. Some kept busy with the sprint, some others ad lots of interruptions or meetings, etc.
Results
Overall, it was a useful exercise for a week and brought insights as to how each individual works on a daily basis. For us, it seems that It could be used in the future when issues appear that affect the productivity of the team. We decided that this experiment should also be done with the rest of the team members, so they can reflect on their own working habits.
Keep in mind that waste for one person may be important for another. For example, a product owner may face many personal interruptions throughout the day but they can often be important to creating a smooth development process. However, to a backend developer, each personal interruption may completely throw off their thought process, causing them to need extra time to get back into a focused state.
On a team level, meetings are of course necessary (some may call it a necessary evil) the point is not to see each one as waste and eliminate them all but merely to take a step back and see how many of them actually contributed to the team completing their goals and how many of them could be eliminated, shortened or limited to fewer people in the future. Here is a few key points we got out of the drill:
- It made people aware of the recurring meetings & tasks, which gave a better understanding of the impact of one-off meetings and tasks that come up throughout the week. Meetings not only take time but also creates more follow-up work.
- Small interruptions during the workday, even if very minimal have a big impact on productivity and setting dedicated meeting time slots can avoid breaks on focus work. 2 hours of focus work is more valuable than 4 hours of work spread throughout the day
- Preference for more blocks of non-sprint work together (and in the morning), rather than spread out during the day.
It was a very insightful experiment at the personal level, I hope this can help you pin-point the improvements your team can make in productivity.
