BC2-Identify & Plan to Eliminate Waste

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  3. Basecamp 2
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  5. BC2-Identify & Plan to...

Why

To fully exploit the advantages of Basecamp 2 (as well as future Basecamps) the system must be able to adapt to change, minimize waste and maximize flow in the development/delivery value stream. Anything that impedes the smooth flow of work, through the System of Delivery, to effectively deliver working, tested, valuable output is considered “waste” and is a candidate for elimination. 
In some cases, the waste is “internal” to the System of Delivery in the form of processes and policies, dependencies across team lines, and architectural considerations to be addressed. Internal waste is often characterized as adding Lead Time (e.g. internal design or architectural reviews) or requiring significant orchestration (e.g. managing dependencies across shared-services teams). 
In other cases, the waste is “external” to the System of Delivery in the form of corporate procedures (e.g. project management gate-type approvals and/or funding cycles), dependencies beyond the control of the System of Delivery (e.g. adoption of releases by operations units), and other aspects of the Enterprise that require remediation. 
In all cases, it is important to understand that reducing waste often entails investment of the Expedition in terms of time, technological considerations, headcount or other “costs” where a Business Case is likely required to justify the economic tradeoff of removing the waste in the system.

How

The Expedition, as part of their commitment to continuous improvement, may identify waste in any number of ways through regular retrospection, investigation of their metrics, or as a specific Kaizen event. 

Any root causes of a problem can be named on the list. Once the team has a list of the wastes, they will begin to create the solutions for removing them. 

Before the Expedition can muster agency to change the parameters of the value stream, it must demonstrate competency to improving within the current constraints. This may even mean sub-optimizing some processes to adjust for managing some external constraint that it cannot yet change. 

Once there is a backlog of waste to remove (who’s root cause is within our power to change), the Expedition must form a plan to solve the waste. Using the Problem Report/A3, and any other data available, Expeditions can prioritize each item. 

This is an exercise of change leadership. Because the delivery system has demonstrated results in optimizing within, Expeditions are able to expand their scope to include the end-to-end value stream, and streamline anything that impacts delivery to customers, in order to generate improvements. To have success in expanding influence, it is important to highlight the cost and/or impacts of waste in the system. 

The Expedition and/or the Transformation Leadership Team (TLT) may need to develop a data-supported Business Case for some initiatives to demonstrate the costs and benefits of improving the system of delivery by removing some forms of waste. 

Note: A key difference to distinguish this outcome from External Waste or Strategic Refactoring, is teams only solve for internal inefficiencies. Anything that requires a group external to the system of delivery to change is not a priority to solve for now.

Success Criteria

  • Teams are actively identifying, tracking and able to discuss the problems waste introduces 
  • A forum has been identified to review the Problem Reports/A3’s (i.e. in the TLT or during an Ops Review Meeting with the Product Category Team) and a process for reviewing/prioritizing Problem Reports is in place (and documented) 
  • There is a plan for automating or encapsulating capabilities necessary to remove dependencies on external contributors 
  • The TLT and/or Product Category Team is acting with agency across the organization to engage other parts of the business in improvement efforts 
  • Release metrics and retrospectives inform improvement plans discussed in the TLT and/or Product Category Team Ops Review Meetings

Supporting Material 

Coaching Activities

 

Understand the principle sources of process waste

Strategy kernel is codified in a living document and contributed to regularly with new knowledge 

Strategy is linked / traceable to the work 

Equip teams with techniques to discover waste in their Governance process 

Give teams tools to self-analyze their flow and identify bottlenecks
Where the organization has more mastery of Agile intentions, we can weed out some “training wheels” installed in BC 1
Develop a plan to eliminate other “waste” in processes 

Formally assess the technology suite and highlight where it impedes moving fast 

Understand the impact of constraints around the development pipeline. Draw attention to how these impact quality 

Look for opportunities to improve quality by making the pipeline more robust, quicker feedback to fix quality defects, and shifting left our attention to where we drive quality 

Develop a specific CI/CD Plan to address technical impediments 

Create a Plan to Eliminate Waste 

Identify work that a Team can do themselves in the appropriate Backlog(s) 

Where a Team does not have agency to eliminate the waste themselves, ensure the problem can be adequately defined, quantified and addressed with the relevant organization(s) via the Product Category Team and/or TLT 

Instantiate a continuous improvement practice

Across the System of Delivery, create a cadenced, formal method to inspect, maintain and adapt priorities of the backlogs of waste to be addressed The team owning the backlog investigates root causes as they craft a solution for the highest priority items
Issues outside the control of the owning team are escalated.

Basecamp 2 Outcomes

Smaller Backlog Items     |      Sequence Work      |      Schedule For Completion      |      Strategic Alignment      |      Identify & Plan to Eliminate Waste      |      Economic Prioritization of Improvements