The Waste Jar And The Mystery Box

Agile teams love little mnemonics and practices to help enforce the Ways of Agile. We like to put up physical Cards on the Wall to signify a piece of work. We like to ask the Three Questions (“What have I accomplished yesterday?, What will I commit to today?, What is my impediment?“) during Standups. We like to capitalize Agile Terms (ok, that last one may just be me). Above all, we like to create new mnemonics and practices, partly because it helps and partly because it’s fun.

Let’s Get Quizzical

Since I recently blogged about the susceptibility of Agile teams to risk and waste, I thought that there should be a little mnemonic / practice to help teams manage it. One way to do this is by asking each team member to complete the following sentences on a regular basis:

• Risk: “I don’t understand how to do ______ or how  _____ will work”
• Waste: “During the iteration, I wasted my time on _______  or had to rework ____“

We could ask these questions during retrospectives or maybe even standups.

Let’s Get Physical

More interestingly, we could do what one of our delivery teams came up with. They decided to capture waste by using a Waste Jar. That is, they have an actual jar into which team members deposit little notes anytime they do something wasteful. These notes are then reviewed during retrospectives by the entire team.

We can do something similar for risks with what I call the Mystery Box. Yes, you guessed it, it is a box into which team members deposit little notes anytime they run into something they don’t understand. Sort of like the Parking Lot, but in box form.