In the context of process improvement, waste refers to any expenditure of time, effort, or money that does not result in a corresponding increase in value in the eyes of the company's external paying customers. Process improvement reduces costs by improving the following areas of waste typically found in IT organizations:
- Repeatedly fixing the same incidents; duplication of effort
- Reworking failed changes, cost of errors
- Reinventing the wheel; solving problems and writing software that already exists elsewhere
- Maintaining data in multiple places
- Maintaining assets (e.g., software, applications, network lines) that are not used by the business
- Late detection of errors leading to an excessive expenditure of time, effort, and money in remediation
- Misallocation of resources or confused employees, resulting in time spent on less important work
- Customer outages impacting customer satisfaction or revenue
- Unreliable, inconsistent service, business disruptions, poor system availability and performance, or missed project delivery dates resulting in lost revenue, lost opportunity, or lost productivity in the business
- Missing project budgets resulting in additional costs to deliver
- Misusing investments or assets, or perhaps not using them to their full potential
- Lost time dealing with preventable problems and firefighting
- Demotivated employees not achieving full productivity
- Completing tasks that can be done through automation, such as physically printing and delivering reports
- Penalties and fines
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