What causes this?

Repetitive and manual work refers to tasks that can be feasibly automated due to their high frequency and low variability. Repetitive and manual efforts in software development are often caused by routine tasks that haven’t been automated. These can include mundane activities like manual testing, routine data entry, repetitive configuration, or deployment tasks that are necessary but don’t necessarily require the unique skills of a software development team. Such tasks can consume valuable time that could otherwise be spent on innovative and high-value work, like feature development or addressing complex technical issues.

What’s the impact on your organization?

Repetitive and manual efforts waste time and resources, shifting focus from strategic activities to low-impact tasks. This misallocation increases human error, wastes valuable talent, slows development cycles, and delays new features or products. This bottleneck hinders the organization’s agility and scalability, affecting growth and the ability to meet customer demands and execute business strategies. Automation is a strategic imperative, not simply a technical upgrade, to prevent stagnation and ensure a dynamic future.

How can this type of waste be reduced?

Reducing wasted repetitive and manual effort in software delivery can be achieved through toolchain integration. Integrating disparate software delivery tools with Planview Hub streamlines processes, automates repetitive tasks, improves traceability, and reduces human error. A connected toolchain results in a more efficient and agile delivery process, allowing teams to focus on value-add work and deliver higher-quality software.

What causes this?

A mismatch between demand and capacity occurs when teams have varying production and consumption speeds; when one step in a connected work process happens at a pace that is either too fast or too slow for the subsequent step to handle. For example, if Team A produces 10 items but Team B can only consume eight, the excess becomes wasted effort, leading to a backlog.

Efforts to optimize at the team level can worsen the situation by speeding up one part of the process without considering its impact on others. Technology work is not a factory assembly lines where tasks are automatically synchronized. Monitoring Flow Efficiency®, which measures wait times, is crucial in understanding how to create a smooth flow of value delivery.

What’s the impact on your organization?

A mismatch between demand and capacity leads to sunk costs, decreased efficiency, team frustration, and compromised work quality. This imbalance can impede the organization’s responsiveness to market changes and customer needs, affecting competitiveness and profitability.

Achieving a balance between demand and capacity is what fuels smooth operations and sustainable growth. For example, at Planview, we found a customer team with 11 months’ worth of overproduction, indicating they could have reallocated their capacity to other, more strategic tasks for nearly a year without affecting overall production.

How can this type of waste be reduced?

To reduce the mismatch between demand and capacity, organizations should align resources with workload through effective planning, prioritization, and continuous monitoring. Utilizing Flow Metrics from platforms like Planview® Viz provides insights into workflow and production rates, helping to visualize processes, identify bottlenecks, and optimize resource usage.

Without metrics that provide this type of end-to-end visibility, efforts to maximize productivity can lead to overproduction, ironically slowing down the system, like a car weaving in slow traffic. In particular, measures Flow Efficiency®, the ratio of active work to waiting time, which can identify areas of overproduction and help teams reallocate resources to better align demand with capacity. With end-to-end metrics, organizations can make informed decisions to adjust strategies and redistribute resources, leading to improved efficiency and productivity.

What causes this?

Excessive rework, where significant and unforeseen additional work is required to meet a project’s original value proposition, often stems from unclear requirements and poor communication between stakeholders, developers, and testers. Inadequate testing, quality assurance, and technical debt also contribute to rework, as unresolved issues compromise software performance and scalability.

Organizational culture and processes that focus on rapid feature delivery without prioritizing quality and collaboration can lead to repeated mistakes. The absence of continuous integration and delivery practices further exacerbates the problem by delaying problem detection and resolution. Addressing these factors is crucial to reducing rework and enhancing overall efficiency in technology organizations.

What’s the impact on your organization?

Excessive rework in a software organization primarily leads to customer disappointment, as it affects timely product delivery, resulting in decreased customer satisfaction and potential revenue loss. Additionally, it drives costs and resource consumption up, impacting the organization’s budget.

In complex organizations, disruptions caused by rework cascade, affecting not only the team responsible for the defect but also the others dependent on their deliverables. It also harms team morale and productivity, as constant corrections can demotivate developers, creating a vicious cycle of increased turnover and constant onboarding. Moreover, managing ongoing quality issues leaves little time for innovation and new feature development, slowing growth and hurting competitive position.

How can this type of waste be reduced?

Reducing excessive rework requires a comprehensive approach. Improving clarity and communication of requirements creates a shared understanding of goals and desired outcomes. Robust testing, quality assurance practices, and regular feedback loops can catch and resolve issues early.

Tools like Planview® Viz enhance these efforts by providing insights into how much effort teams are expending on particular work types, like features and defects. Its visibility allows IT leaders to streamline development through smart tradeoffs that are based on the lifecycle stage of each product instead of using a one-size-fits-all approach.

What causes this?

Excess work in progress (WIP) occurs when teams have more tasks queued than they can process within a planning period; this pileup is often caused by poor visibility into the backlog and a lack of understanding of how workload affects productivity. Inadequate, disconnected tools for visualizing and managing workloads exacerbate the issue, which is characterized by excessive multitasking and reduced productivity. Teams become overwhelmed with a growing pile of unfinished tasks, muddled priorities, and too much concurrent work.

Without a systematic approach to track and limit WIP, tasks accumulate unchecked and continue to build since teams have no way to accurately estimate the time and resources they need to complete their work. The end result is overloaded teams and bottlenecks across the production pipeline.

What’s the impact on your organization?

Excessive WIP leads to decreased productivity as teams juggle too many tasks. The mismatch between work in progress (Flow Load) and completion rate (Flow Velocity®) overwhelms teams, making them slower and less productive. The stress of excessive tasks can damage employee morale, increase burnout and turnover, and bring additional hiring and training costs.

Unfinished tasks can also conceal critical issues that affect performance by allowing software bugs and technical debt to accumulate. Combined, these factors can cause delays that can harm the company’s reputation and negatively impact customer satisfaction.

How can this type of waste be reduced?

To effectively reduce excessive WIP, setting simple limits may not be enough. Managing WIP on a team-by-team basis, scaled according to each team’s historical production rates, ensures teams can focus on completing current tasks before taking on new ones. Regular retrospectives and iterative planning help balance task flow with team capacity. Value Stream Management practices enable more precise measurement and management of WIP and suggest keeping WIP (measured by Flow Load) to about 1.5 times the producible amount in a period to prevent overwhelming multitasking.

Enhancing visibility with real-time AI-driven insights, like those provided by Planview® Viz and Planview Copilot, can significantly reduce WIP levels by identifying bottlenecks and enabling workload adjustments. This contributes to improved communication and collaboration, a sustainable work pace, reduced burnout risk, and smoother delivery.

What causes this?

Misaligned work occurs when unclear priorities or poor communication cause development teams to work on tasks that don’t align with an organization’s top priorities. Teams who set priorities in isolation disrupt the entire workflow as upstream teams wait and downstream teams work on low-priority tasks due to blockages, inadvertently prioritizing them in the value stream.

Prioritizing high-priority work is essential to avoid compounding waste across the software delivery lifecycle. Effective management involves allocating more planning to strategic goals (for example, releasing critical features) and ensuring alignment with the overall strategy, focusing on Flow Load® and Flow Distribution® to minimize misalignment and enhance efficiency.

What’s the impact on your organization?

Misaligned work squanders resources and delays critical initiatives. This disruption affects every team through delays, increased costs, and reduced market competitiveness. It also impacts customer satisfaction and trust when product and service delivery are routinely postponed.

Organizational culture suffers as employees feel disconnected from the company’s goals, leading to decreased motivation, productivity, and retention. In the long term, misaligned work hampers innovation and adaptability, preventing the organization from responding to business changes and seizing growth opportunities.

How can this type of waste be reduced?

To reduce misaligned work, organizations must clearly define, communicate, and ensure understanding of strategic goals at all levels, fostering a culture where these objectives become the North Star. Connecting roadmaps and tasks with strategy with solutions like Planview Roadmaps allows everyone to maintain a singular vision. Teams can constantly reassess tasks against company priorities and shift focus as needed.

A flexible approach allows teams to quickly pivot from lower priority tasks to high-value work. Planview® Viz supports these efforts by using Flow Load and Flow Distribution to visualize the amount and type of work underway, enabling teams to quickly identify and correct misalignment. By leveraging such solutions, organizations can become more effective by prioritizing and executing tasks in alignment with their strategic priorities.