The first and most important thing about lean (which then directly leads into agile and scrum) is conditioning yourself to see waste. Everything everywhere is full of waste. If you go to a coffee shop and order a coffee, the only value-adding activity is when the shop puts the coffee in the cup for you.
It's not making the coffee, coffee made that you don't possess is worthless. Explaining your order, the barista writing it down or typing it in, getting a cup, putting the cup under the spout, cleaning up, grinding coffee, everything else is waste. It's a hard mindset to get, and sounds negative but it's liberating.
What does the customer want? Coffee. Imagine a coffee shop with geofences where when you go inside it charges you, you put your cup under the machine and fresh coffee pours in, that's a low waste operation.
Just to prove a point though, the machine that fills your cup has an issue. You get one coffee, and it's freshness is arbitrary, and the quality control is lacking. Coffee shops can make you all kinds of stuff. If only instead there were some system where the coffee you want was made fresh just for you, and you could just walk in and grab the cup.
Such a system is only possible by tracking when you come in, what you order, and you being predictable.
The three primary wastes are:
- Pointless Work (Muda)
- Overburden (Muri)
- Uneveness (Mura)
Muda, or pointless work, gets the most attention because it's the easiest to identify. Waiting on the barista (waiting), cold coffee (over production), the barista walking around (transporation), getting your order wrong (defects), the coffee not being right next to you already (motion), asking for options you don't want (excess processing) are all waste.
Many people philosophically get to the point where they see all Muda as a side effect of "overproduction" which is anything a customer did not ask you to do. A customer doesn't ask you to walk around, they asked for coffee. There's a million ways to think about Muda, what qualifies, what doesn't, which category pointless work fits into.
Thinking in a meta way about it - analyzing what waste is what category, is probably in itself waste. Customers do not want a detailed inventory of everything you do to waste their time and money, they want you to fix it.
Muri is often neglected entirely. I think it's because of our culture around business. I'm not a communist or anything, but work should be easy to do right. When diabetics have to check their blood sugar, it hurts, you have to stab yourself. There's no way around it.
Now that there are CGMs (continous glucose monitors) they don't have to stab themselves as much, but they still have to when they put it on. And, it still hurts. If you ever watch a diabetic do a finger stick or put on a cgm, you can see the hesitation, they do not want to do it but they know they have to.
This is Muri. CGMs check your sugar sometime between every 30 minutes to every 5 minutes from my understanding. It would be burdensome for people to check their sugar by stabbing themselves with a needle every 5 minutes, which is why before CGMs they take their sugar when they get up, when they eat, and before bed.
It's not because it wouldn't be valuable to check it more frequently, it's because you can't expect people to do that.
There's no physical limitation preventing people from doing many things, it's pain that stops them. To reduce Muri, make everything as easy as possible.
In our coffee shop, you can't train a barista to make absolutely every single possible thing that's constructable with your supplies. You can't expect them to serve absolutely every customer no matter how belligerent. Training takes time, it's hard to remember everything, different orders take different times, different customers are different.
It's also worth noting that as you reduce all other wastes you are increasing Muri. You're making it painful to work. Resting is nice, people rest in the waste.
This waste is right in the middle, between muda (often focused on) and muri (often neglected). Simply being uneven or unpredictable is wasteful. If demand were perfectly predictable, you could make almost any business profitable with ease. The world is not predictable, so there will always be uneveness, or opportunity cost.
Our coffee example - what prevents the shop from just remembering when you come in and your order and just having it ready the moment you arrive? Uneveness. If you had customers that came in, in a nice orderly fashion, and ordered the same thing every day, you could put in a subscription service, make precisely when you need, when you need to.
If every order took precisely the same amount of time it would be easy to plan shifts, order supplies, and set hours.
Perfectly predictable behavior makes everything better.
You can see by now that a perfect coffee shop would do nothing customers don't want, and minimize what employees find difficult. It'd be a stress free place to work, that deliveres perfect products quickly. And, it would do all those things with such precise timing you could set a metronome to it.
That can't exist. That's why automation won't elminate every job, and that's why everything will be full of waste forever. Even two separate, equally unwasteful businesses might have their waste in different places.