The Most Common Forms of Waste in Product Development

Waste is any activity that does not add value to the final product. As described in the Toyota Production System, there are seven forms of waste. In this article, we examine each of these forms of waste as they relate to software-related products.

1. Overproduction: Producing more than needed or before it’s needed.  

You may have heard about the Pareto principle, which suggests that only about 20% of features built into most software products are unused by users. This is also true in organisations where the product teams do not collaborate enough with their users to understand their problems before new features are built into the product. This problem is compounded because these unused features are maintained, upgraded, and tested as long as the product is operational. Sometimes, these unused features lead to bloat and confuse users, which could lead to low adoption of the product overall.

2. Waiting: Delays & Idle Time

If we were to examine the process from idea to building a feature put in users' hands for most organisations, we would notice a lot of waiting time for approvals, budgets, reviews, analysis, and testing, among many other things. Waiting increases the time to market for products and sometimes leads to missing out on market opportunities, especially in a competitive market. Waiting could also be due to having too much work in progress in the system, and people have to context switch a lot, which affects how quickly work gets done.

3. Transportation: Inefficient Movement of Resources

Think about an organisation with siloed processes and teams; for instance, a team of developers gets work done, and the work is subsequently sent to the central testing team. The impact is that the developers move on to the next piece of work in their input queue when the testers find any defects; then, developers have to juggle between fixing bugs in their previous and current projects.

4. Overprocessing: Redundant Work

We did some work for an investment bank in the United Kingdom. The organisation has a process with 14 approval gates to approve any new product or change to the production environment. We investigated these approval gates, and 9 of these were redundant and not required at all. Sometimes, these excessive meetings and processes were symptoms of a lack of trust in the Product Team; ultimately, these processes led to an elongated time to market.

5. Excess Inventory: Physical or Digital

The Product Backlog is a bag of hypotheses and assumptions; until these items are implemented and deployed so that the customer can validate them, the organisation doesn't know whether they will deliver the promised value. We have seen organisations create refined requirements for an entire year in their backlog; this is waste, and sometimes, these items are not implemented for multiple years. 

Another instance worth exploring is when developers work on items in the form of untested code passed on to an overwhelmed tester.

6. Motion: Unnecessary Movement of People

One of the downsides to Projects is that they contribute to the movement of people around work. Project ways of working eventually lead to a high amount of work in progress; the impact on people is an unsustainable level of context switching. As with other forms of waste, the behaviours described here lead to a longer time to market in organisations. A few years ago, we were helping a large multinational, and we discovered that from executives, portfolio and at the team level, there was too much work in progress, which means a lot of work was kicked off, but not much was delivered. This could also be due to a symptom of a lack of clear direction, hence a new project every couple of weeks.

7. Defects: Errors & Rework

Very rarely do we have clients contact us to help improve the quality of the product; usually, clients reach out to help their teams deliver faster. One of the metrics we review is the number and frequency of defects reported during development and in production. When the team is consistently pressured to deliver faster without robust testing practices, over time, the quality of the product degrades, leading to rework. Rework eats into the capacity that should have been used in building new user features. Rework could take many forms, including customer complaints, production patches, time spent investigating, 

Bonus: Unused Talent and Creativity.The world of work is increasingly complex, and top-down approaches that do not involve the whole could be wasteful. People closer to the work should be involved in strategy and goal setting. Co-creation and collaboration should be the norm to unleash creativity across the organisation. When people feel their opinions do not matter, they are disengaged, which could be a talent left on the table.