Frida Kahlo, the Mexican painter once said, “Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies and goes away”. The first part of this statement is applicable to all subjects, including, “Rework”. While, “Rework” is traditionally considered a waste, in the following situations, “Rework” may be less unwanted.
1
Innovation
By definition, innovations or the first attempts at it cannot give exactly the desired results. Unsuccessful innovations are required to eliminate failure modes and rework leads to a marketable product
2
Product Development
When factors outside the control of the organisation change, like tighter laws, rapidly evolving customer requirements etc., rework is almost mandatory to sell the product
3
IT Coding and Development
Especially when large applications are developed over a period of time, the circumstances under which decisions related to development would have been taken would have changed with time. While under the set of then prevailing conditions, the decisions would have been correct, in the present circumstances, the same decisions may warrant review. Upon review, if these decisions are found to be not appropriate to the current circumstances, then they may need to be changed and the work impacted may need to be redone. This is preferable to trying to avoid rework and ending up releasing a poor application with known issues.
4
IT Testing
As part of testing a unit or a module of an application, if say Mixed case incorrect input is not detected as an error by the code, it is advisable to rework the code to further increase its robustness
5
Ignorant Market
When no one including the potential users know what they need, the only way to create and supply what is needed is by experiments, testing the market with prototypes, feedback on failures and rework
6
Painting or creating other works of art
Perspectives are available only after creation of the entire work of art or atleast part creation. Rework for improvement is the route to the success of that work of art
7
Cooking
When testing the soup to be served at the beginning of a huge dinner, if the soup is found to be too salty, rework in the form of dropping a few quartered potatoes over a simmering flame is essential to de-salt the soup and make it consumable
8
Wine making
Wines are known to get better with age. If a wine has not been sold after the targeted ageing (say) ten years, its price may further increase as in the additional waiting time the wine would mature more and thus become better. This additional ageing is a kind of preferred rework.