How to Prevent Mistakes and Improve Work Processes

Handing off work tasks can lead to unnecessary movement and need extra communication to clear up uncertainties.

Mistakes such as incorrect, missing, or unclear information or materials can cause waste and require effort to fix. These defects become more challenging to spot if they go unnoticed for too long. Automating dependencies on operations and making them available on demand is crucial to avoid these issues.

Individuals or teams may have to work extra hard to meet goals, which can create new errors.

To encourage honesty and prevent problems, removing blame and fear from the workplace is crucial. Improving daily work processes is vital for an organization’s success. Teams might need help to prevent problems from getting worse. Individual task assignments should be kept to the smallest in Agile teams. Task switching decreases the effectiveness of the entire team.

The Agile methodology places great importance on the people involved in software development and their user interactions.

Agile teams should strive to cut separation. Specialized teams could be better in this environment, as each team has its own goals and objectives, even if the company has a common goal.

Constant communication can lead to less team collaboration, which can cause delays.

The team that developed the code handles its maintenance, as they had the initial need for it. Yet, teams should refrain from building things for the sake of it or to learn new technologies. While understanding technology is crucial, it should come at a reasonable cost to the company.

Pursuing projects that impact the business is the most critical aspect of software development.

We need to break the habit of people asking Brent to help with break-fix work, do the same with change implementation, and get all the knowledge into the hands of the people doing the work. If they need help understanding it, we have a skills problem in those teams.

Remember, the outcome matters, not the process, controls, or the work completed.

[¹]: Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale