I recently read 2 second Lean by Paul Akers. It’s a marvellous little book. It has re-ignited my deep-seated love for lean thinking, and in particular for continuous improvement via aggregation of marginal gains. I highly recommend you take the 2-3 hours to read it, and then look for ways to apply Akers’ ideas to your team.
Partly inspired by 2-second Lean, and partly by the mob programming practice of daily retrospectives, I’ve recently been experimenting with using daily retrospectives for continuous improvement. Imagine you ran a retrospective at the end of each day, using only the following question:
Let’s set aside the first 30 minutes of tomorrow to eliminate, forever, some of the waste we saw in our practices today. Let’s see if everyone in the team can remove at least 2 seconds of time we wasted today not delivering value. Which 2 seconds should we choose to eliminate? And what shall we do to achieve that?
What would you pick? Ideas from the teams I work with have included learning keyboard shortcuts, using Sublime Text instead of Visual Studio, deleting unused code, documenting setup steps in a wiki, and so on.
Perhaps you could also follow Paul Akers’ practice of making “before” and “after” videos of your improvement, to share with other teams? (Hopefully I’ll find the time to share some of my personal 2-second kaizen videos here soon.)
