One Small Example of Eliminating Waste

Written on  6/21/2011 5:58 PM

The Background

 

  There's one module called XYZPRB in my previous organization. It handles many kinds of resources operation requests by splitting/re-organizing them and passes to other modules to write hardware. So it has many interfaces and many features need piece of the code in XYZPRB to working.

  It was maintained by two developers in one Scrum Team due to history reasons.

 

Catch the Smell

 

  The two developers normally got several different internal or customer cases per-day.

Someday, one is in training, another one told that he got 10+ problem reports and it seems he needs overtime work. His words reminded that XYZPRB situation has lasted for very long. Even the average case amount is not very high, there's huge waste accumulated.

 

Identify Waste

 

  We found a meeting room, discussed the history situation and we think we need change.

Previous case goes like this: "Tester reports a case to us when finds XYZPRB error log-> We find related feature owner->  Co-work to investigate the root cause".  During that, phone calls, mails may take place several times and may have Ping-Pong rounds.

 

  We drew the current and desired case handling paths on the white-board, then it's clear where to take effort to drive the change:

 

  Can feature team handle corresponding feature's maintenance?  It would  not be very hard for them to learn the piece of code related to their feature in XYZPRB. And their overall view of the feature will help a lot for case handling. Meanwhile our two guys can free some time on own team's feature.

 

 

 

Actions to Eliminate Waste

 

  In order to drive the change, we planned some actions:

 

• Making technical sharing sessions to testers about XYZPRB's functionality and after that they can do some pre-analysis and report cases to corresponding feature owners more.

 

• During case handling, persuade related feature owners to take ownership.

 

Collaboration in Organization

 

  Days later, while we were taking actions, we noticed that our Product Owners and Domain Experts were also splitting the features in XYZPRB and negotiating with corresponding Feature Teams.

 

  Amazing! Nice feeling! Collaboration happened without a plan :)