A final blog in a series of Lean articles includes specific integration improvement concepts that can be applied to the 8 traditional wastes.
introduced the premise of applying Lean to integration. This was followed by Observations of Lean, Where Do You Get Your Ideas?, which was a light piece about brainstorming for process improvement ideas.
Now for some specific examples for integration wastes and opportunities for improvement.
The original piece identified Lean's 8 wastes as:
- Transportation - unnecessary movement of materials
- Inventory - excess inventory and work in process
- Motion - extra steps by people to perform the work
- Waiting - periods of inactivity
- Overproduction - production ahead of demand
- Overprocessing - rework and reprocessing
- Defects - inspection and corrective action
As related to the world of integration and software development, the same wastes can exist but from a different perspective. Below are the wastes with drawn correlations to integration wastes.
- Transportation - unnecessary steps, business processes, people, or data exchange
- Inventory - integrations, code, or work performed but not implemented/deployed
- Motion - switching between tasks and priorities
- Waiting - delays internally from line of business areas or external trading partners
- Overproduction - the development of extra (out of scope) features or functions, or add-ons with poor ROI
- Overprocessing - revisiting decided courses of action, changing course, or excessive quality review
- Defects - data, code, and errors
Given some of these examples, think about your integrations and environment. See what people, processes, or technology can be tweaked and/or re-engineered to improve performance for your organization, customers and partners.
There is so much information regarding the application of Lean to integration, and this series has only scratched the surface. For more information, please consider a few other sources that I have found valuable for our integration practice and these articles.
- Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash (Mary & Tom Poppendieck)
- Lean Integration: An Integration Factory Approach to Business Agility (Schmidt & Lyle)
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