Jo's Newsletter - The Waste Retro 🗑️

Retrospectives - The Waste Retro 🗑️

Author

Joanne Perold
February 12, 2025

JO’s Newsletter 📰

Hello, and welcome to the retro newsletter. It is the month of love, and romance may or may not be in the air. It feels like the world is moving at an incredibly fast pace, and sometimes, it’s challenging to keep up with everything that is happening. When I get busy like that and things are fast and pressured, that is usually a signal to me that I need to make time to reflect. It’s even more critical to reflect when it feels like you don’t have the time. This week, I’m going to share a waste retro I did, focused on using the 8 Muda (wasteful activities in lean) and looking at how they show up in a team and what to do about it.

“We do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience.”

– John Dewey, How We Think (1933)

What's in this newsletter

The Waste Retro 🗑️

Johannesburg CBD - gridlocked

Sometimes, when teams have been doing retro’s for a while, they get into the Retro Rut

Using a frame like the eight lean wastes can give a team a structured way to look for waste and give them fresh thinking. I notice with my body and exercise if I do the same things all the time, my body gets better at doing those things, but not necessarily stronger overall. One of the things we want for our teams is to build critical thinking muscles, and to do that, we also need to offer variety. Here are some questions to ask for the eight lean wastes.

I have used this for a few different teams, and for some teams, it was a great lens for them to use, and for one of my teams, they thought it was too much. So think about what your team needs and either pick one or two or use all eight as a starting point.

You can also go through all eight and identify an improvements backlog. Once you have a backlog, you can use your retrospectives to work through the improvements backlog.

So, how does it work? You still want to use the normal 5 phases, but you use the 8 wastes as a mechanism for gathering data.

1. Set the stage

Pick an exercise relevant for the team to set the stage. Remember the key points here are:

  1. Get all the voices in the space

  2. Create safety and connection

  3. Share the agenda, purpose and outcomes

  4. Make sure everyone knows how to participate

2. Gather Data

Use the eight lean wastes as a frame to gather data. Either on a Miro board or a whiteboard, a flip chart, or whichever tool you use, create a space for each of the eight lean wastes or those applicable to your context.

  • Transportation: Where do we frequently hand over work? How often do we need to hand over work between people, teams, or systems?

  • Motion - What actions do we perform that do not add value to the product? What could we stop or change?

  • Waiting—If a work item can go from start to finish through our process without waiting, we can quickly complete it before starting on the next step. What causes work to wait in our system?

  • Inventory: Where do we have features, code, reports, or finished work items lying around without current use? How often does that happen? How many items are built but can't be delivered or integrated?

  • Overprocessing: What steps in our process might we no longer need? What did we used to do because we needed it, but now might we not need it?

  • Overproduction—If we produce more than our users will use or want, we risk adding complexity to our product. What examples of overproduction might we have in our system?

  • Defects - It's more expensive, and it takes longer to fix defects in production than it takes to fix them as they happen. What are our expensive defects?

  • Non-utilised talent—If we have fantastic humans who can't use their talents effectively, we waste their skills, experience, and knowledge. Where might we have underutilised or non-utilised talent?

Use questions to help people think.

Give the team time to add sticky notes for each of the lean wastes above.

3. Generate Insights

Once all the data is available, make space for people to view it and ask questions. Using the data, create themes and groupings. Look for patterns and make time for discussion. Depending on the size of the team and the complexity of their processes, you might not have time to discuss all of the data, so vote on the most important ones to dive deeper into.

4. Decide what to do

Once the team has spoken about their insights and patterns and unpacked some of the root causes and systemic issues, create a space for ideas for change.

You can then use those ideas to choose from. This is a reminder to pick one or two to act on. Choosing too many will result in none getting done. Another reminder is to make sure that when you choose an idea, you also have a champion. This person might not be the one to do all the work or thinking, but someone who will take responsibility for reminding the team, setting up the session to discuss it, or creating the backlog item as a reminder.

5. Close

Remember that great facilitation means having a good opening and a good closing. Tie up loose ends, ask for feedback, and appreciate everyone's time.

Here is a link and password to this retro on a Miro board

Password : WasteRetro12345

If you are a Miro user and want a copy of this board, email me, and I will send it to you.

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I’d love to hear from you. Contact me at [email protected] and share what you want me to discuss or ask for help with specific scenarios.

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