Eight Agile Wastes of Hanukah: #7 Delays

Neyyappam are another traditional food fried in oil for Hanukkah. These sweet fritters are less widespread than latkes and sufganiyot, and are a specialty of the Cochin jews of South India.

I have not yet had the pleasure of trying neyyappam, but they look to be delicious!

Agile Waste #7: Delays

"A fast game's a good game."

Delays generate numerous kinds of waste:

1. If there's a long delay between planning and doing, conditions will often change, rendering your plans out-of-date.
2. Delays between activities make it more difficult to remember important details, resulting in additional defects (Agile Waste #3) and additional time spent re-learning.
3. The longer something takes to deliver, the longer the wait until benefits begin to be realised.

What to do instead

There are many great techniques for reducing delays:

1. By mapping your value stream(s) from concept to cash, you can identify where the big waits are and focus improvement efforts there.
2. Don't just limit your WIP (Agile Waste #5), limit your queue lengths. Long queues make for big waits.
3. Record impediments that result in delays and prioritise improvement activities to reduce and remove them.
4. Big items take longer to finish. Learn to split them down, and prioritise the high value components.
5. At the individual and team level, organise your work day to maximise maker time — big blocks of uninterrupted time — to help doers get stuff finished by reducing managerial interruptions.