Eliminate these Wastes & Escalate Your Mobile App Development Process

The prime goal of any organization is to cater for the needs of a larger audience, gain tremendous profit and ultimately, lead the competition. To achieve these targets, the businesses go for different strategies both online and offline. One of these strategies is Mobile app development.

Developing a mobile application is, undoubtedly, the topmost strategy of the present era to take a business to newer heights. Companies are highly investing in app development to get an app that could help them achieve the above-mentioned objectives effectively. The mobile app developers are also putting their best efforts to satisfy their requirements with high-quality services at the earliest. But, most of the time they encounter with some issues that disturb the normal app development process. Such disturbances are termed as “wastes.” These wastes can cause various problems, such as longer development cycles, decreased quality of products, increased project peril, etc.

There are basically 8 wastes in the mobile app development process (acronym DOWNTIME), described as  below:

Defects

Defect refers to the mistakes or issues that result in incorrect or unexpected output. They are usually too small to notice and thus, take extra time, resources and money to fix. This slow down the whole process of app development.

They occur due to poor understanding of the concept, lack of engineering or technical capabilities, team misalignment and poor processes. It’s not easy to get 100% defect-proof process, but one can minimize its risk and enjoy profitable app development services. The best solution to this waste is consistent testing. This will enable you to solve the issue before it turns into a bigger one.

Overproduction

Overproduction means when you produce things/modules more than required at that very moment to bring out the desired outcome. This is common to find in cases where the mobile app developers think of adding additional features (basically associated with the recent technology and trends) to their application, even though they are useless. This kind of waste results in inefficient time and energy classification and inability to prioritize effectively. The right solution for this waste type is having a clear idea of the whole process, each module, and objectives of the application.

 Waiting

All those tasks that can cause delays or interruptions in the normal mobile app development and/or delivery come under this category. This can be associated with waiting for the information required for task completion, inaccurate capacity planning, delays from external parties or internal resource gaps. For this type of waste, the right solution is to ensure that you have all the required resources with you.

 Non-utilized talent

This waste is more common to find in the case of the waterfall approach, though the agile process can also suffer from the same. It happens when the project teams fail to take the perks of the wide range of talent, skills, ideas, and capabilities of the team. The best solution to this problem is to have appropriate knowledge of skills and interests of all the team members. And thereafter, assign them tasks they are great at.

Transportation

It refers to a lack of information among the whole team. Usually, it happens that the information about a particular module resides with a single person. When the tasks are shared with another person, he/she has to learn what all the former person knows. Thus, time wastage in re-learning the things.

The best way to overcome this waste is to continuously share the information about the different parts of the mobile app development process with each and every member of the team. This way all will be familiar with each module and would be able to work efficiently, in case required.

Inventory

All those tasks that are partially done or done ineffectively as per the project parameters come under this category. This type of waste not just affect the project velocity, but also result in an increase in budget.

Common causes of Inventory waste are a misunderstanding of the concept, dependency of the modules on each other, inappropriate priority settings.

Again, proper communication among the different people associated with the project can lessen the risk of this waste.

Motion

When all the mobile app developers and other team members are not at the same place, this type of waste occurs. There are various types of communications tools to keep them connected in the real-time, but sending emails and making calls causes time wastage. So, keep all the team members at a single place and reduce this waste.

Excess Processing

Excess processing refers to overproduction of something just to complement the existing thing. In general, you can call it as gold plating. These efforts are typically unnecessary and increase the time & resources consumption.

The right solution to this is to understand what is required for an effective mobile app development and what not. Thereafter, do what is necessary.

As now you know what all wastes are associated with mobile app development, try to overcome them and develop a highly-effective mobile app within time and budget.