Context switching is killing your gains (part 2)

How do we defend our team from distractions? Ad hoc meetings, poorly organized ceremonies, rework, and a host of other demands? A "waste walk" is the answer.

Jan 30, 2023

Defend your team

There are a lot of distractions out there, sapping our productivity and keeping us from getting things done. In part 1 of this article, I talked about how much context switching can hurt our productivity and how to recapture that lost time on a personal level.

So how do we defend our team from an influx of distractions? Ad hoc meetings, poorly organized team ceremonies, rework, and a host of other demands?

Something I love about agile is how successful teams benefit from its relentless focus on productivity. The other side of that coin is that when it’s not working, there isn’t a lot of structure to get things back on track. Agile ceremonies are supposed to keep us focused, but which ceremonies?

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Awareness is key

We need an understanding of value add and non-value add work. By value add and non-value add I mean productive effort versus that which isn’t truly efficient or useful to the outcome of your project.

In other words, in order to fix the problem we need to understand how bad it is. Only then can we focus on solutions and improve continuously over time.

That’s really the heart of it: how do we defend our focus time — making sure that every available moment is its most productive?

Agile ceremonies like standups and prioritized backlogs are supposed to defend value add effort — but sometimes it goes off the rails. When that happens there are tools to get us back on-track.

Courtesy https://MonkeyUser.com. — How do we defend our focus time? (MonkeyUser.com)

One of my favorite is a waste walk. It’s a structured observation of activity that identifies all the effort that doesn’t add significant value. By identifying waste and brainstorming ways to eliminate it, a waste walk uncovers continuous improvement opportunities and improves efficiency.

A waste walk is wonderful at exposing waste. What’s more, it’s a simple activity. It wraps around your regular sprint or iteration cycle and uses very little effort.

Stop the bleeding

The whole point of a waste walk is to identify where you’re bleeding time, effort, and energy. Discover those activities that suck the team into unproductive work. Activities that consume a huge amount of time but return little or nothing of value. Those are the activities that “hurt the soul” of your team, draining motivation and causing stress or conflict.

But before we can fix the problem we need to recognize there is a problem. The longer we’re exposed to a situation the more likely it gets overlooked. We become numb to the pain because “that’s the way it works.”

We need to make the problem visible again. A waste walk does just that. It creates shared understanding between leaders and teams about current challenges. It exposes “boots on the ground” intelligence about what’s actually happening, versus what was planned.

Part of the key is believing that “the way it works” can always be improved.

A waste walk sheds empirical light on which project methods are working — and which ones need attention. It does this with a few simple actions:

Over a short period, like a sprint, each team member “buckets” their time during the day (this takes less than 5 minutes out of each team member’s day).
At the end of the period, each bucket is aggregated (using a report) into value add and non-value add time (for instance, coding versus unexpected meetings).
The largest aggregate of non-value add effort becomes the team’s focus for improvement.

The following drawing shows the buckets I used during a recent waste walk:

The team decides on the best “buckets” for their context.

I’ve seen teams realize 40% of their time could be recaptured with more advanced automation, better tooling and improved design effort. After implementing automation and design changes one team gained 37% of their lost time and effort.

That means they went from an average velocity of 15 to nearly 21. It was like the team suddenly discovered 118 hours per week that they put back into the project!

The storied history of waste walks

The waste walk has its roots in Lean Manufacturing. Taiichi Ohno, an engineer who rose to Executive Vice President at Toyota, originally developed it as part of the Toyota Production System (TPS). While its roots run deep in industrial automotive process, TPS itself is fundamentally about agile and continuous improvement.12

The system defined seven types of waste (“muda,” a Japanese word meaning “wasteful”), and later added an 8th category. Many modern implementations use the acronym DOWNTIME to categorize waste:34

Defect, or having to rework something, including poor designs or bugs.
Overproduction, producing more than is necessary (think about overengineering or building something the customer doesn’t value).
Waiting, any extra time when people, processes, or equipment is idle.
Non-utilized Talent, not fully applying the talents and skills of the team.
Transportation, unnecessary movement of the work product (think about moving a packaged binary through unnecessary steps).
Inventory, excess work product that does not add value (have you ever maintained a server that is underutilized, or perhaps not used at all?).
Motion, movement that is unnecessary or that does not add value, including movement that is too quick or too slow.
Extra Processing, continuing to process beyond the requirements (think about optimizing processes that are not a bottleneck in the first place, or applying control processes that aren’t always necessary).

Running a quick waste walk

While it sounds involved, it’s actually pretty simple — although the subtleties can be tricky.

I think the best way to do a waste walk is during a live sprint. While you can do it retroactively, you’ll lose fidelity and it tends to be more challenging. On the other hand, if the team does the walk “on the fly” it should take less than 5 minutes a day for each team member.

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The first step is deciding how to bucket everyone’s time. This means identifying the team’s activities across the sprint and creating simple, clear buckets for the team to catalog their time. It doesn’t need to be super detailed — actually, it should be pretty general to avoid ambiguity. Just enough detail to map to the team’s daily activities. Here’s an example:

Then, everyone classifies their time into each bucket every day, noting the time as “value add” or “non-value add.” The former means it was productive, while the latter means it was essentially unnecessary.

Coach the team on the difference between necessary and unnecessary work. Use the DOWNTIME categories as a baseline. For example, the first time we create a user story it adds value, whereas going back and reworking the story because of mistakes or incomplete understanding is non-value add.

In the example diagram above, a third of the team’s work effort was being lost to non-value add activity. This is shown in the lower right by calculating the total non-value add time versus total value add time. What’s more, the team members put in an average of 88 hours each week, effectively trying to “catch up” on the lost time with overtime. The bottom line is this: If we can recapture all the waste, we'd free up one-third of the team’s budget and time!

In the final analysis, we learned that most lost effort went to requirements modification, rework, added quality assurance effort, and meetings around those activities.

That information is invaluable — it lets the team dig deeper, discover why so much rework is needed, and start capturing better requirements… and recapturing lost time.

Tips for a successful waste walk

Create psychological safety. Frame the waste walk as process improvement, not performance evaluation. Emphasize that it’s about improving the system, not criticizing individuals.
Everyone takes part. Everyone in your organization matters. Don’t spend all of your time on the most urgent fires. Appreciate that this is about preventing fires by investing everyone’s time.
Include stakeholders. Engage every member outside the normal ceremonies (like standups and planning). If they’re involved, they are part of the process.
Be observant. Build trust so your team brings you the real issues at hand.
Be genuine. Be sure to recognize people for doing the right thing, especially in support of continuous improvement activities.
Share. Keep repeating core concepts and praise others when you see it in practice.
Do no harm. Timing is everything. Plan in advance and don’t start your waste walk at crunch time or you risk making the team’s challenges more difficult.
Don’t bypass leadership. Involve leadership before changing priorities, requirements, or design. This can be a huge win, too, simply by exposing gains from improvement.
Recognize this is step one. The waste walk gives you intelligence about where effort is being wasted. Use that intelligence to drive continuous improvement. Build a strategic plan to reduce the waste.

If you’d like to learn more about running a waste walk, check out GembaKai. I also wrote this series about data pipelines, using a mobile-friendly team waste walk tool as an architectural example. Informative screenshots show the kind of intelligence a waste walk exposes.