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Waste log (DOWNTIME)

Lean names eight kinds of waste with the acronym DOWNTIME. Below is what each one looks like in a student research-software project, followed by the running log. Anyone can add a line to the log at any time; the retrospective reviews it and turns recurring entries into kaizen issues.

Waste categories adapted to this project

Letter Waste What it looks like here Example
D Defects Wrong output, broken pipeline, misread data field A join on repo_name silently drops rows because of case differences
O Overproduction Building analysis nobody asked for, or before the question is settled Writing a classifier before the operational definition of the outcome exists
W Waiting Work that sits idle PR waits four days for a review; issue waits in Todo for a decision
N Non-utilized talent Skills not used, or one person doing everything The member who knows statistics is writing README text while someone else struggles with a test design
T Transportation Moving artifacts between places by hand Copying figures from a notebook into the report instead of generating them
I Inventory Too much work started, too many open branches, unmerged PRs Three open PRs by one member, none reviewed
M Motion Hunting for information, switching tools Searching chat history for the dataset download link that should be in data/README.md
E Extra processing Doing more than the acceptance criterion requires Formatting a table beautifully that will be regenerated next sprint

How to log

  • One line per observation. Be specific about the artifact (issue number, PR number, file).
  • Impact: minutes or hours lost, or a defect count, in plain numbers.
  • Countermeasure: what we will try. Leave blank if unknown; the retro fills it.
  • Kaizen: the kaizen issue number once one exists.

Running log

Date Sprint Waste Description Impact Countermeasure Kaizen #
2026-09-13 Formation Motion Assignment schedule lives only in the PDF; members ask for dates in chat ~10 min per member per week Timeline copied into project.yml and PROJECT_PLAN.md
2026-09-13 Formation Waiting Project board cannot be created by script until the GitHub token has the project scope Board setup delayed Documented in scripts/setup_project_board.py; owner runs gh auth refresh -s project

Review procedure at the retrospective

  1. Read every line added since the last retro.
  2. Group lines by waste type. The type with the most lines or the largest impact gets a 5 Whys (ROOT_CAUSE_TEMPLATE.md).
  3. Create one kaizen issue per countermeasure the team agrees to try. Write the issue number back into the log.
  4. Note the top waste type in the retrospective file under "Most important process improvement".