- Topics: [[Productivity]] --- The 8 wastes are a core part of [[Lean manufacturing]]. The 8 wastes are as follows: 1. Overproduction 2. Inventory 3. Defects 4. Transportation 5. Over processing 6. Motion 7. Waiting 8. Unused talent It all begins with OVERPRODUCTION. Why do we overproduce? We overproduce because... - We don't know what our demands are. This is due to poor optics and/or anxieties we feel towards our own processes or productions. - We anticipate a (high) rate of DEFECTS. Therefore, we must over-produce to meet demands, accounting for a percentage of failure to occur. - We don't question existing inefficient practices. [[What is made must be managed]]. This is INVENTORY. Effort must be invested into organizing, storing, and retrieving inventory. Unnecessary inventory is unnecessary overhead. Overhead and poor quality as a result of overproduction can lead to DEFECTS. Defects are the physical manifestation of waste. Things that you can "see" and "feel" that must then be thrown away. Excess inventory means excess TRANSPORTATION. Transportation doesn't necessarily mean physical transportation of goods, but rather, the delivery of goods, services, and information from one point to another. Therefore, transportation can also include communication for digital material or information. The more things we have, the more people involved, the more processes we have, the more we have to communicate. The standardization of all things above leads to OVER PROCESSING. Process to manage excess inventory. Process to manage defects. Process to manage excess transportation. And ultimately, process to manage process, which can lead to the trap of creating process for the sake of process. To get into a place where we value process over progress. Every step along the path of production (from planning, organizing, communicating, to making) requires MOTION. For digital spaces, this means manually doing many micro tasks - mouse movements and keyboard entries. Less process means less movement. Every step may not be instantaneous. The result of that is WAITING. Waiting for a build to complete. Waiting for something to export. Waiting for someone to get back to us. Usually the only thing someone can do while they're waiting is to context switch to do something else. But of course, there's a cost to context switching, especially when they have to inevitably context switch back. When folks get into the mindset that they cannot change things, the feelings of [[Learned helplessness]], or if they don't feel empowered to make suggestions, we then experience UNUSED TALENT. Everyone has ideas and insights on how we can make things better. Individual contributors are experts in the areas that they interact with on day to day. They work with and experience waste every minute and every hour of every day. Therefore, we would have the richest insights on things that we can make lives easier everyday, and ultimately the production and products better for everyone else.