Transportation

• Handoffs – Movement of product that does not add value.

Inventory

• Requirements – Product Requirements Documents (PRD), Story Cards – more material information than the customer needs
• Completed code, but not checked-in
• Completed code, but not documented
• Untested codeCode in staging environment, but not in production environment
• Code with overwhelming amount of comments /*comments*/

• Task-Switching – Bodily or mental motion that does not add value
• An evil-twin of Task-Switching is Multi-Tasking

Waiting

• Delay – Idle time when people, material, information, or equipment is not ready
• Waiting for project approval
• Waiting for resources
• Waiting for change approval process
• Waiting for product management or requirements

Overprocessing

• Extra Steps or Effort – effort that does not add value from the customer’s perspective
• Having to relearn what a function, class, or piece of code does
• Having to refactor a piece of code when it already meets requirements

Overproduction

• More Stuff – Producing more than the customer needs or wants
• Featuritis or Feature Bloat: more features than the customer needs, wants, or asked for
• Wrong Thing – Building something a customer doesn’t want or does not use

Defects

• Bugs – errors, rework, mistakes, or is missing something necessary

How about :

• No automation of recurring, low-value, low-skill tasks (data extracts, etc) & automated tests
• Spending on hardware to fix design/code issues (”servers & storage are cheaper than good developers”)
• Inertia (not quite the same as “Waiting”) : “things are different here”, “we’ve always worked like this”, etc.- Death by meetings…