Tag Archives: manufacturing wastes

Unfinished Projects = Costly Excess Inventory

Mary Poppendieck’s seminal work, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit, lists the 7 wastes of manufacturing and maps them to software development, among other things.  (In a recent webcast, Poppendieck added 3 more wastes to the list, and I’ll write about those in another post.)  Of the original seven wastes, the one that I found most enlightening is that unfinished projects lying about is the equivalent of having excess inventory on hand. Continue reading Unfinished Projects = Costly Excess Inventory