Quick Answer

What: Most of a process's elapsed time is not work. It is waiting: the request sitting in an inbox, a queue or a weekly batch while busy people work on other things. Waiting is one of the 8 wastes of Lean, and in most processes it is the largest and the least owned, because it happens between roles and belongs to none of them.

Why it matters: Teams measure the clock that runs while people work and report it proudly. Customers experience the clock that runs from request to delivery. When only the first clock is measured, the second one has no owner, and the process stays slow while everyone in it is fast.

How to apply: Follow one request with both clocks running. Then classify what happens to the work while nobody touches it, against all eight wastes, before anyone prices or fixes anything. A waste analysis produces a ranked list: what to attack now, what to monitor, what to name and accept.

The payoff: The argument about who is slow ends, because nobody was. The waiting gets a name and an owner, and the cause analysis that follows has something real to explain.

Ask a team how long something takes and you will get one of two answers, depending on which clock they are reading.

The first clock runs while someone is working on the thing: keying the request, checking the drawing, signing the approval. Add those up across a typical request and the total is often minutes, sometimes an hour or two. The second clock runs from the moment the request exists to the moment the person who asked gets what they needed. That one reads in days, and not rarely in weeks.

The gap between the two is the subject of this note, and of the tool it introduces.

Two clocks

The gap is not idle people. Everyone involved in a slow process is usually busy the whole time, on other requests, in other queues. The gap is the request sitting still: in an inbox, in a batch that runs once a week, in a queue for a meeting that approves things on one afternoon.

Lean practitioners call the first clock touch time, or processing time, and the second lead time. The ratio between them is one of the most revealing numbers in any operation, and one of the least often measured, because measuring it requires following the work rather than watching the workers. Watch the workers and you see effort everywhere. Follow the work and you see it lying still.

I have watched this measurement end more arguments than any other single number. A process with a reputation for being slow almost always has departments blaming each other, and the blame has names attached. Then somebody follows twenty requests with a stopwatch, and the touch time comes to a couple of hours against three weeks of elapsed time, and the argument dissolves. Not because anyone was persuaded. Because there was no slow department to find. The people were fast. The process was slow.

Nobody is assigned to waiting

Waiting has a peculiar property. It happens between roles, so it belongs to none of them.

Every role in a process has an owner, a job description and usually a metric. The gaps between the roles have none of those. A request handed from drafting to purchasing spends its waiting time in a place that is nobody's desk. Each owner's own clock looks healthy, because it is. The customer's clock is the only one that shows the problem, and the customer is not in the room.

This is why waiting is not a failure of effort. It is a failure of assignment. The gaps belong to whoever can see the whole flow, and in most organizations that is exactly one person, the leader who sits above the roles. A leader who asks how long people worked on a request gets a proud answer. A leader who asks how long it waited between them gets a silence, and then the real project.

The 8 wastes, and why the names matter

Lean gives waiting its place in a list. The 8 wastes of Lean, remembered by the word DOWNTIME, are defects, overproduction, waiting, not using people's knowledge and skills, transportation, inventory, motion and excess processing. A step adds value only if the customer would pay for it, it is done right the first time, and the customer actually wants it. Everything else falls into one of the eight.

The eight names do a specific job. A team looking at its own process sees the wastes that move: rework being redone, a clerk walking to a printer, a form being re-keyed. It rarely sees the wastes that sit still. Work waiting in a queue looks like nothing happening. Skilled people spending the day on clerical work looks like the job. Records produced for nobody look like diligence. Going through the eight one at a time, and writing a concrete example against each, is what turns an impression into an assessment. Asked what it sees, a team reports motion and defects. Walked through the eight, it arrives at waiting and puts a number of days against a queue it had stopped noticing.

There is a second reason waiting gets missed, and it is the more expensive one. Waiting that has been in place long enough stops being seen as waste and starts being seen as the schedule. The payment run happens on one day of the week. Approvals wait for a meeting that sits every Tuesday. Nobody chose these as delays. They were chosen as routines, years ago, for sensible reasons, and the waiting inside them has been promoted from a problem to a rule. The largest waste in a process is very often the one that has been there long enough to have a name.

Classify before you cost

A waste analysis begins by classifying, not by pricing, and the distinction matters enough to state plainly.

Pricing failure is a different job, done by a different tool. The cost of poor quality puts a currency figure on defects, rework and the failures a customer feels, and it earns a project its business case. A waste analysis asks an earlier and simpler question: what is happening to the work while nobody is adding value to it? Its unit is time and activity, not money. Trying to do both at once produces a document that is half a ledger and half an observation, and does neither well.

Classifying first also protects the analysis from a particular kind of argument. A dollar figure invites a dispute about the figure. A concrete observation, "approvals wait for a weekly meeting," invites only the question of whether it is true, and it usually is.

How a waste analysis works

The tool is plain. Against each of the eight wastes, the team records four things.

Where and how the waste shows up, in concrete terms. Not "too much waiting," which is a mood, but "the exception queue waits for a single approver, and the payment run happens on one day," which is an observation someone can go and check.

What it costs the process, in time, quality or effort. Not a currency figure; a description of the damage.

How severe it is: high, medium or low.

And what will be done about it, which is where the honesty lives. Attack it: real, large, ours to remove in this project. Monitor it: real, smaller, watched and revisited. Accept it: non-value-adding, currently required by a regulation, a contract or an audit trail, and written down so nobody has to pretend it is value.

That third answer is the one teams skip. A step nobody will name as waste gets defended as work; a step named and accepted stops absorbing energy, and the energy goes where it can still change something. Not every wasted step can be removed, and pretending otherwise is how a waste walk turns into an argument.

One more rule, and it decides whether the assessment gets acted on or argued with. Frame every waste as a property of the process, never of the people running it. Waste is not a verdict on the people doing the work. It is a description of what the process asks of them.

The output is a short ranked list: the severe wastes marked attack now. In Lean Six Sigma terms it is an early Analyze-phase deliverable, sitting just after the process has been mapped and walked, and just before the cause analysis begins. It belongs to the third of the five questions every improvement project answers, and it is disciplined about not answering the fourth early.

What comes next

A waste analysis names what is happening. It is deliberately silent on why.

The high-priority wastes become the effects that the cause analysis then explains: cast wide in a fishbone, narrowed with the five whys, ranked in a Pareto. Waste is what the process does; why it does it is the next question, and the answer to that question is what eventually gets fixed. Along the way, the elapsed time that started the whole exercise gets measured honestly, with its normal swing recorded, so that whatever the project later claims has a starting line to stand against.

None of that can begin until the waiting has a name. Which is the whole reason to classify before trying to fix. Once the second clock is written down beside the first, it is obvious where the weeks went, and just as obvious that the answer is not to hurry anyone.

I write one of these every week, drawn from what actually happens on projects rather than what the methodology says should. You can join the newsletter here.

Frequently asked questions

What are the 8 wastes of Lean?

Defects, overproduction, waiting, not using people's knowledge and skills, transportation, inventory, motion and excess processing, remembered by the word DOWNTIME. Each is a category of activity that consumes time or effort without adding value the customer would pay for. Waiting is usually the largest by elapsed time and the least noticed, because work sitting still looks like nothing happening.

What is the difference between touch time and lead time?

Touch time (or processing time) is the time someone is actually working on a request. Lead time is the elapsed time from the request being raised to its delivery. In most administrative and approval processes touch time is measured in minutes or hours and lead time in days or weeks; the difference is waiting, and it lives in the handoffs between roles.

Is a waste analysis the same as a cost of poor quality analysis?

No. A cost of poor quality analysis prices failure in currency and builds the business case. A waste analysis classifies activity against the eight wastes and ranks what to attack, monitor or accept, in time and activity terms rather than money. Do the classification first; the pricing has its own turn.

What do you do after a waste analysis?

Take the wastes marked attack now into the cause analysis. They become the effects a fishbone diagram, a five whys and a Pareto chart then explain. The waste analysis names what is happening; the cause tools answer why, and only then does a fix get chosen.