Measuring waste

I had a conversation with Gary Gruver earlier this week and he brought up a really interesting and powerful idea about measuring and monitoring transformation. Instead of trying to measure "productivity" or other seemingly attractive but often damaging metrics, he focuses on the waste removed from the system.

This is significant given that we are usually focused on the outcome of a transformation which is usually to be faster and more efficient (the days of going faster and throwing cost out the window are behind us at the moment). These are great goals, but also somewhat difficult to measure. The measurement can easily lead to being gamed; faster becomes about doing inconsequential work as fast as possible.

Waste, Gary points out, can be more easily measured and there is less motivation to game these measures. For instance if you see the amount of time waiting for build and test to run in order to get feedback as waste, you would want to reduce that.

I'd put in here that a subjective measure here, with the right context can help you a lot in getting to what is important.

For example, if you are measuring productivity and you ask a developer, "are you delivering at speed", they'll say "we sure are!". But if you you drop the productivity stick and ask the developer "Are you delivering as fast a you could? What is holding you back?", you will get a more insightful answer.

Moving to a platform as a product model is a transformation and we need to measure the right things to know if we're getting the results we expect.

Gary has made time available to anyone who wants to chat and I'd encourage you to take advantage of his deep experience transforming software development and delivery.