The 7 Deadly Wastes of Lean

Planview AgilePlace’s founders and early employees first learned about Lean in the context of logistics and manufacturing. However, they found that the Lean concept of reducing waste in terms of inventory, transportation, motion, etc. could be universally applied to other white-collar business processes. In this article, Jon Terry, Chief Evangelist of Lean-Agile Strategy at Planview, provides an expanded view on waste that takes the entire system into consideration. He identifies seven wastes that prevent businesses from generating value, including too much work in progress, delays, extra capabilities, technical debt, handoffs, task switching, and defects. Terry shares best practices on how to eliminate waste, such as balancing work in the system to the capacity of constraints, incrementally delivering capabilities through a minimum viable product, creating cross-functional teams to shorten feedback loops, and focusing on root causes of defects to avoid future problems.