Sprint Retrospective: Identify your team wastes using TIMWOOD
The purpose of Sprint Retrospective is to plan ways to increase quality and effectiveness ~ The Scrum Guide 2020
Have you been experienced in situation when you feel your team are doing good and everything went well, but the performance is just went plateau. Every time your team run a Retrospective, there is no significant action plan as an outcome. You’ve tried so many method in running Retrospective but you just did not find any issue in the team.
Maybe it’s time to try something new, I’ve shared in my previous article about how you can Supercharge your Retrospective for better Engagement and Outcome. In this article, let’s try on different perspective, let’s try to assess from process point of view, specifically on waste.
Have you ever hear TIMWOOD? Yup, if you are Lean Practitioner, you will be familiar with it.
TIMWOOD stands for 7 wastes of Lean :
- Transportation : Unnecessary movement of goods, equipment, and people
- Inventory : Having too much inventory, however, can lead to longer lead times, damaged or defective products, and inefficient use of capital
- Motion: Unnecessary, dangerous, and complicated movements
- Waiting : The time that is lost due to a pause in productivity
- Over Production : When production exceeds customer demand, facilities are left with excessive goods to store and manage
- Over Processing : product or service that has more features or capabilities than required or expected by the company / customer
- Defects : Products that do not meet standards, these products must either be scrapped or reworked, thus adding costs to the operation but not adding value for the customer
Let’s discuss on how we can use the 7 wastes on Sprint Retrospective
Let’s Identify Team Wastes using TIMWOOD on Sprint Retrospective
During Sprint Retrospective, we should inform the team that there we will use different format, but the objective still the same, which is Continuous Improvement.
First thing first, introduce them on TIMWOOD 7 wastes of Lean and how we will use this as a tools / framework in this Retrospective.
As an additional, I usually use this video on how Toyota Production System (TPS) effectively helped feed Hurricane Sandy Victims by eliminating waste :
After the team know about 7 wastes, then let’s start with assessing the current processes to identify where are the waste happened. Here are the example of processes that can be assessed :
- Requirement Gathering
- Development
- Deployment
- Product Backlog Management
- Stakeholder Management
- Go To Market
Here are the steps that I usually used to identify the waste :
- Give them example of TIMWOOD 7 wastes in Manufacturing so they have visibility and better understanding. This is I usually used :
- Identify the waste in your current process using TIMWOOD 7 wastes. This is one of example as a reference :
- List all the identified wastes and do prioritization on which waste is more important, more urgent and have more impact. I usually used Eisenhower Matrix. You can also find other prioritization method, such as Impact vs Effort, MoSCoW, etc.
- Choose 2 or 3 wastes to be improved (or to be eliminated if possible) in the next Sprint. Discuss the action plan with the team & create commitment to do it. Here is the example :
- Put the list of waste that is not included in next Sprint as an “Improvement Backlog” for next Sprint Retrospective.
Closing
Sprint Retrospective is very important Scrum Events which sometimes are being misunderstood and underestimated because it’s not too related to work / deliverables. But we need to always remember and remind the team that the purpose of Sprint Retrospective is to increase quality and effectiveness. Therefore it is really important that we regularly held Sprint Retrospective with the Team. Using TIMWOOD method is one of the effective way to identify wastes that happened in your team and trigger the discussion with the team on how to minimize or eliminate the waste.
