The Seven Wastes of Knowledge Work and What to Do About Them

Waste or ‘Muda’ is a key tenet in lean management.  Although present, waste is harder to see in knowledge work, and far too few organizations actively identify or try to eliminate waste within their processes.  Using examples from software development, we will review common wastes we might encounter and their impact on our work.

Recognizing the different types of waste helps us optimize our ways of working while accelerating value creation.
We will then explore Value Stream Mapping, a powerful visual technique that helps us analyze and identify inefficiencies in our processes.  Through a simple everyday example, we will learn the essential steps to creating and analyzing a value stream map, and see how it might be used to increase value added work.

Continually rooting out waste should be an integral part of every knowledge worker’s job, and we hope the tools and techniques presented will help you along the way.

About Our Speaker: Raj Indugula

Raj Indugula is the Senior Vice President of Agile Consulting at LitheSpeed.

Raj is a versatile Agile Coach (Process & Engineering), and professional trainer with nineteen years of experience in delivering IT solutions across the public and private sectors, at startups as well as Fortune 100 companies. An early adopter of Extreme Programming (XP) and Scrum, he has over twelve years of hands-on experience with the pragmatic application of Agile processes and XP-inspired code quality practices, and coaching teams on the adoption of Lean-Agile-DevOps practices. He has helped develop all roles, from executive leadership to engineering teams, in lean software development, process frameworks, product ownership, and agile engineering and testing practices.

Raj’s expertise and passion spans organizational Lean-Agile-DevOps maturity assessment and improvement planning, agile program and portfolio management, agile software development using Scrum, Kanban, XP, BDD/ATDD, and clean code practices. He shares his experiences frequently at conferences around the country.