Mark McDonald

There are seven sources of waste or muda in lean thinking. One of these sources of waste is unnecessary or excess motion.  In manufacturing, workers having to engage in overly strenuous or damaging movements create waste.

In IT there are few overly strenuous motions – even in extreme programming.  Think about Unnecessary/Excess Motion as the ‘hero’ actions that are common in IT.  These actions are strenuous and often unnecessary when IT manages its responsibilities and people appropriately.  Whenever you need a hero you are requiring excess motion and therefore generating waste.

By hero I do not mean the people who pitch in during a crisis.  You have an outage and someone stays late to resolve it.  You are facing a security breach and its all hands on deck.  Those are legitimate crisis situations and while you can be prepared and execute a plan, there is hard work to do plane and simple.

Habitual Heroism that is unnecessary or excess is the hard work that people build into their worldview, their self worth and the way they work with others.  Heroism that is required as part of your day-to-day work is waste.  It is unnecessary.  It is excessive.  Here are some of the warning signs of this type of heroism, see if you recognize yourself or others in the following:

• Creating a personal bottleneck such that information and decisions have to flow through the individual rather than the standard team or process

• Taking on extra responsibilities, particularly when picking up the slack or recovering from a setback created by another player on the team

• Hiding information and expertise, often by innocently assuming people knew or were in the loop – often when it is a loop consisting of one person – them

• Monopolizing the choice assignments and opportunities to learn and pick up new skills

• You have to constantly give them praise for doing their job, agree that it is very hard and be ready to recognize them as delivering outstanding and unique value.

Recognize a colleague or even yourself from time to time?  Well each of these activities, and I am sure more than a few others, are signs of the unnecessary heroism.  This happens often in IT because its complex and when things don’t work out there is a strong “fix it” culture.  We value people how are able to do this and rewards/praise/promotions for such heroism can easily become the preferred way of recognition.

A wise man, Bob Spurgeon, told me a long time ago – be careful some of the best fire fighters are also the best arsonists.

So how do you address this source of waste, how do you put Spiderman back into Peter Parker?  Well first take a lesson from the comic books and recognize that real heroes do not enjoy their hero status.  They want to be normal and are reluctant to leave their alter ego to become the hero.  Contrast that with the behavior of the villain, who is always in hero mode and always wanting attention.

What do to about the hero?

• First think very hard about letting the hero go – they are caustic to your culture, your team and your relationship with the business.  As one CIO said, “life is too short to work with jerks” and habitual heroes can be jerks.  You are not killing Superman; you are liberating a whole group of ace players in your organization.

Other ideas include:

• Tell the hero that their behavior is hurting more than it is helping.  Make them aware that their actions are making the company less capable.  Tell them that they are doing more harm than good.  If they are real heroes, then they will reform their behavior.

• Give the hero what they want, the job responsibilities, position, tools etc, but require them to live up to new and different performance expectations.  Heroes want more responsibility based on their ‘powers’ if you do not give that responsibility, they will never change their view or behaviors.

• Change their job so they are no longer the experts but need to rely on others to learn new skills, perform well in a new job and demonstrate new abilities.  Changing the job requires them to learn new tricks.  If they don’t and revert back to their hero ways, ten consider letting them go.

• Give a habitual hero the responsibility for mentoring and teaching others.  Make it part of their job description, pay package, etc.  Convince them to teach others to better handle tough situations so they can focus on something new.  For every Batman there is a Robin.

Unnecessary work or motion is a form of waste in the enterprise and IT.  While IT workers often do not have to contort their bodies, risk physical injury or endure physical stress, they do face this source of waste.  Habitual heroism is unnecessary and a symptom of waste rather than an expression of a valuable resource.

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Category: Lean Thinking Signs of weak management Tools     Tags: Business Leadership, Business Management, IT Leadership, IT organization, Tools

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