Tag Archives: standardized work

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Standard Work

Standard Work is one of the most powerful but least used Lean tools. By documenting the current practices, it forms the baseline for continuous improvement. Let’s review some of the benefits quickly.

Benefits of Standard Work

  • Standardizes the work across different teams, different people; ensuring consistency across the organization; making outcomes predictable and measurable.
  • Sets clear expectations, branding as to what’s ‘given’ when the team/individual says a certain activity is ‘Done’.
  • Ensure that certain routine, mundane tasks get done (and don’t get overlooked due to them being ‘boring’.)
  • A common ‘platform’ is set up, a baseline against which the effectiveness of the individuals and/or team can be measured; ensuring a certain level of quality.
  • It’s the DNA of continuous improvement (CI). It makes CI routine and ingrained in the very existence of the organization.
  • Standard Work is a ‘snapshot‘, a picture of the best way to do things at this moment in time, with an eye on continuous improvement.

Without standard work, there is no kaizen (CI)
– Taichii Ohno

In essence, Standard Work helps you in minimizing waste and maximizing value delivery.

Would it help to have your standard work documented? Can it help you, your team, your organization improve the productivity and deliver more VALUE for your customer?

Go ahead and document your Standard of Work.

What’s Better yet…

Get these Standard Work templates for FREE, and put your team on the “hyper Productivity” lane!

Standardized work is a collection and implementation of the best practices known to that point.

Scrum Master

Standard work

 

 

Product Owner

Standard work

 

Scrum Team

Standard work

 

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Standard Work is a ‘snapshot’, a picture of the best way to do things at this moment in time, with an eye towards Continuous Improvement.
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Interested in more …

Interested in more than just the Standard Work? How about Checklists, template emails, and worksheets to help your Scrum team?
playbook for scrum teams
Why reinvent? Leverage these Pearls of Agile Wisdom! Grab this Playbook now, for a tiny price!

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Not convinced yet…

Listen to what Steph has to say below 🙂

Testimonial from an actual Customer

I purchased this playbook and find it very helpful.  I think the email templates came in handy when trying to wrangle folks from all over the company together.  They keep me organized and the email now provides more information with these structured templates.

The “Standard Work” for each role is great as well.  It provides helpful hints on role responsibility and helps with keeping me organized with all the artifacts related to a project.

Great work and thanks!

– Steph W

I am convinced! Give it to me Now!

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Scrum Team and Standard of Work

Standardized work is a collection and implementation of the best practices known at that moment. We discussed Standard of Work for Product Owner and Scrum Master in earlier articles. I also gave you a template of the checklist with activities for these two important players of Scrum.

Third leg of Scrum stool

As we all know, Scrum is often referred to as three-legged stool. The three legs being the Product Owner, Scrum Master, and the Team. The third leg, the Scrum Team, is charged with the responsibility to build and deliver the product functionality. Everyone on the Scrum team must be rowing in one direction to deliver this in a timely fashion to the customers.

Scrum team

Rowing Team – every effort in one direction

Let’s look at the typical activities that the team must carry out.

Daily

  • Attend the daily Scrum, on time and in person.
  • Come prepared at the daily scrum with your updates.
  • Provide you updates at the daily scrum and listen to others’ updates.
  • All team members should answer “the three questions”.
  • If, for some reason, you can not attend the daily scrum, please reach out to a ‘buddy’ and ask her to take your updates to the team. [Do not send you updates in an email, that should be the last resort! ]
  • Adhere to the Office Hours agreed upon as a Team. Let the team know if you are unavailable during those office hours for any reason.
  • Work (swarm) on the highest priority stories.
  • Show all work on the Scrum board.
  • Update tasks with hours remaining.
  • Seek out opportunities to help your team members and/or swarm on driving the Stories to completion.
  • Ensure development standards are followed.
  • As soon as a Story is Done, demonstrate it to Product Owner to get her Acceptance and mark it as ‘DONE’.
  • Adhere to DoD before marking a Story as Done.
  • Learn to say ‘No’. Use the ‘No’ repertoire.
  • Ensure that the WIP limits are followed.
  • Make it Fun 🙂

Weekly

  • Identify ways to get better. Collect ideas for Sprint Retrospective or create improvement stories. Seek out opportunities to get that 1% improvement [ The Rich Employee by James Altucher ]
  • If required, represent your team at the Scrum of Scrum event, bringing team’s updates and challenges to the community.

Each Sprint

  • Participate in Sprint Planning. Push back if the Story is not READY; not allowing it to get into a Sprint.
  • Get into sprint. Participate in Backlog Refinement.
  • Avoid the group thinking and provide your honest, unbiased estimate based on your knowledge and experience. Be comfortable with confrontation and agree to disagree.
  • In the daily standup. Participate in the Demo and Retrospective.
  • Identify opportunities for improving how work is done. Less with more done.
  • Create stories for improvements to be undertaken by the team.
  • Communicate improvements to Agile Coach or Process Owner for improvements beyond the control of the team.
  • Ensure all stories & tasks have a good description and validation.
  • Ensure all stories/features/epics have sizes.
  • Make a sprint commitment that you believe in. Work to achieve the commitment.

Each Release

  • Participate in the Release planning activities
  • Identify enabling work.
  • Provide estimates for all work
  • Identify dependencies and risks.
  • Collaborate on the “Definition of Done” for the team.
Standardized work answers the 5W+1H of a process – the who, what, when, where, why, and how Share on X

Is your scrum team following this checklist? What is your team doing differently, that is working for them? Share your thoughts and comments below.

Standard work

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In essence, Standard Work helps you in minimizing waste and maximizing value delivery
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