Why do we want to achieve standardised work?

We standardise to sustain good practises, make audits less painfull and make our work sustainable. Standardisation is not the goal, sustainability is. But how do we get from our current way of working to a more sustainable way?

"To throw away what you no longer need is neither wasteful nor shameful." - Marie Kondo

We start with sorting out what we don't need. We clean our work process and get rid of clutter. Anything that does not contribute to the creation of value, we remove. Ask with every step of the work process if it is really needed; what would happen if the step is removed? When you create a work item, think about the minimal product you are happy with.

"A dramatic reorganization causes correspondingly dramatic changes in lifestyle and perspective. It is life transforming." - Marie Kondo

The next step is to reorganise. To make it easy to work, to reduce movement, lookups and extra meetings. We can improve on this by refining the work we do and collect or link all information on a work item to that work item. We stop going to meetings that are not helping us to add value to the product we create.

"Visible mess helps distract us from the true source of the disorder." - Marie Kondo

To keep stuff organised, we regularly clean it. This means looking at our processes and stuff we make, and clean out the clutter. Did we took a short cut somewhere? Fix it. Do we need to refactor to improve? Do it. Stuff that is not maintained will cause headaches in the future. And yes, it takes time to do this, but it will take up more time down the road, when it gets in our way.

Now we come to the part where we can standardise. We make rules about the previous steps. We define our way of working, our definition of done, our test strategies, our meetup schedules. We make rules about how we as a team work. And we publish the rules to make it transparent to everybody how we work.

"The space in which we live should be for the person we are becoming now, not for the person we were in the past." - Marie Kondo

Sustainability is the ability to keep a pace over a longer period of time. In scrum this long period is called a sprint; perhaps we should have called it something else, because we don't sprint like sprinter. We are not trying to achieve a new world record on the 100 meter, but we are trying to create stuff for others over a longer period of time. We are trying to set a pace and slowly improve on that pace over time. We do this with the previous mentioned steps. We aim for goals and get there with small steps.