Being Agile: Eleven Breakthrough Techniques to Keep You from “Waterfalling Backward”

Why Is It Hard to Eliminate Waste?

The first reason it is hard is because teams have grown accustomed to living with it. And if a team can justify allowing it in the first place, then it can often justify living with it “a little longer.” Some teams do track their waste but almost always as work that needs to get done “as soon as there is time.” (And when does that ever happen?) The connection between the decision to delay doing necessary work and the negative consequences of not doing the work (which typically occur much later) is hard to see and especially hard to quantify—and this is one of the fundamental reasons why waste tends to accumulate and, even if identified and tracked, is never actually eliminated.

Here is a well-worn example, but ...