Compound Thinking

As I said yesterday, your customers define value, and they don’t care a bit about some of the things that your IT Department does. They don’t care about weekly status update meetings, longstanding ticket reviews, or maintenance of your Ticket Tracking system. They don’t care about all the time you spend fixing bugs repairing or repairing corrupted files.There is a name for all of these things that your customers don’t care about — waste!Your goal should be to stop doing these things. Don’t waste your time, or your customer’s money. Where you can stop doing them, where you can’t minimize the time you spend on these activities.

Instead do something that your customers care about! Build systems that protect them from having corrupted files, write unit and functional tests so your users don’t ever see that bug. Get response times down to the point where you wouldn’t have enough “longstanding tickets” warrant a weekly meeting.

And once or twice a month take some time out with the whole team to identify ways to reduce the waste that’s still in the system. The story of Toyota shows that even after 30 years of improvement creative people can still find new areas of waste and ways to remove them.

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