In the last blog post we looked into what happened with our queues of activities and interdependencies when a small company grows, which effects the flow efficiency. Now we are going to look into what happens on the employee side, the resource efficiency side.
We are now going to look into three different categories of administration waste. Waste that the customer does not pay for but that we need, to succeed with our organisation and our projects and programs. We cannot remove it, but we must reduce it to as low waste as possible. In a Value Stream Mapping this waste is called non-value adding activities, and Value Stream Mapping will be brought up in a later blog post, to present it and to show common misunderstandings of it.
We can divide administration waste into three categories:
– Line Administration Waste
– Project Administration Waste
– Program and Portfolio Administration Waste
The last one Program and Portfolio Administration Waste is about project prioritization, start-up/close-down of teams and projects, etc. It is not important for this blog post, so we will dig into that in a later blog post, and what constraints it can put on projects and teams, and the negative impact that many times follow.
The first one is Line Administration waste. In this category we have line section meetings, all employee meetings, individual performance meetings, education, etc. A normal figure is about 10% (the exact figure is not important) of an employee’s time and it is more or less constant and does not change depending on the number of projects the employee is working on. One project will look like this.
And two projects (and more) has the same amount of total waste.
In tomorrow’s blog post we continue with the Project Administration waste.