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Milk Kanban

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Re: Milk Kanban

#41

Post by asjir »

crazygringo wrote: post #23
daveguy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe if putting a piece of paper on someone's desk for precise restocking is too much of "a pain" to the person who drank the milk, then they should rethink their employment there.

I'm interrupted in the office a hundred times a day. It is guaranteed to happen that as I grab the paper and walk to the person's desk, something more important comes up as somebody sees me, and then I have a meeting, and the piece of paper simply isn't important enough to remember next to my other responsibilities. Employees are paid to do the work they're best at. It's a bad use of resources to have them tracking o…

In a 20-person office you'll pass by like 2 people on the way with the card, so it's not a problem. If the office was bigger, and it was a problem, you could just designate a spot for the card next to the pantry.

Re: Milk Kanban

#43

Post by eikenberry »

jimnotgym wrote: post #37

> When people say Kanban, they tend to think of a specific set of practices. Whiteboards & sticky notes (both almost universally virtual). When software developers say Kanban, they tend to think of whiteboards. For anyone who works in manufacturing they would have thought about replenishment first. It is completely ubiquitous anywhere where taking something from a location signals a need for replenishment.These days…

I've worked on multiple Kanban software dev teams and a whiteboard never came into play, vs. the scrum or extreme-agile teams which loved them. Kanban seems more about having tickets organized into a priority ordered queue of tasks.

Re: Milk Kanban

#44

Post by thorum »

oniony wrote: post #21
woleium wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think i would make it “put this card in the reorder box”

And then they have to poll the reorder box every day?

Hm, you’re right. I’m thinking a nearby Raspberry Pi with a camera facing the box. It uses an LLM to identify the box contents and send update messages to Kasia each morning. I’m surprised they didn’t think of this already.

Re: Milk Kanban

#45

Post by CraigJPerry »

mystifyingpoi wrote: post #16
exitb wrote: post #11

It’s an interesting idea, but I’m not convinced it’s a good one. Office managers (or any kind of managers, really) are hired to remove a class of problems, so other people can focus on their job. This is outsourcing bits and pieces of your responsibilities to random coworkers. That being said, none of it is uncommon in modern corporate workplace.

Agree. I dig the idea, really cool, but quoting the article: > it becomes a pain to check the cupboard with milk reserves every now and then If freaking glancing into the shelf once a day (or more like once a week, because this milk has months of shelf life) in scope of full time office manager job is "a pain", maybe that office manager should rethink their employment there.

That’s all the more reason to go event driven right?

If the milk needed replenishing more often, maybe polling the shelf makes more sense - hey the rate of consumption is higher today, I’ll re-order early. That high throughput optimisation doesn’t really shake out if you’re always just waiting for the replenishment event to fire.

Re: Milk Kanban

#46

Post by beachy »

analog31 wrote: post #26
crazygringo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interrupted in the office a hundred times a day. It is guaranteed to happen that as I grab the paper and walk to the person's desk, something more important comes up as somebody sees me, and then I have a meeting, and the piece of paper simply isn't important enough to remember next to my other responsibilities. Employees are paid to do the work they're best at. It's a bad use of resources to have them tracking o…

We outsourced all of those things. The office managers are gone. There's no milk. Also, anecdotally, my dad worked at a place where, if you needed something to be plugged into an electrical outlet, there was a person whose job was do do that. And if that person needed tools, there was another person whose job was to carry his tools.

Decades ago my first real job was as an IBM engineer fixing computers at a heavily unionised timber mill.

One of their many rules was that nothing could be plugged into any electrical outlet on site unless the device had been inspected and signed off by a union electrician.

In a hurry to diagnose a problem with a printer I furtively plugged my non-approved oscilloscope in to a wall outlet. But then I inadvertently grounded a power line with the scope probe and caused a circuit breaker to trip somewhere on the main board. Shit!

A pompous electrician appeared and told me they would be shutting down the entire mill (10K+ workers) while the union decided how to punish me for my rule breaking.

It took much begging and pleading before he relented. My only leverage was that the printer was also used to print pay slips and he would not have got paid that week unless I fixed the printer.

Re: Milk Kanban

#47

Post by mystifyingpoi »

crazygringo wrote: post #23
daveguy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe if putting a piece of paper on someone's desk for precise restocking is too much of "a pain" to the person who drank the milk, then they should rethink their employment there.

I'm interrupted in the office a hundred times a day. It is guaranteed to happen that as I grab the paper and walk to the person's desk, something more important comes up as somebody sees me, and then I have a meeting, and the piece of paper simply isn't important enough to remember next to my other responsibilities. Employees are paid to do the work they're best at. It's a bad use of resources to have them tracking o…

I totally agree with you. I'm actually (despite downvotes) totally fine with bringing the paper tag to someone from time to time. My ego isn't hurt either.

The issue is with creating random bespoke processes, that save maybe 60 seconds of work for that office manager per week, but now involve literaly every person in organization.

Re: Milk Kanban

#48

Post by nicbou »

crazygringo wrote: post #23
daveguy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe if putting a piece of paper on someone's desk for precise restocking is too much of "a pain" to the person who drank the milk, then they should rethink their employment there.

I'm interrupted in the office a hundred times a day. It is guaranteed to happen that as I grab the paper and walk to the person's desk, something more important comes up as somebody sees me, and then I have a meeting, and the piece of paper simply isn't important enough to remember next to my other responsibilities. Employees are paid to do the work they're best at. It's a bad use of resources to have them tracking o…

Then don't drink milk. You have more important things to do.

Re: Milk Kanban

#49

Post by soerxpso »

daveguy wrote: post #19
mystifyingpoi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. I dig the idea, really cool, but quoting the article: > it becomes a pain to check the cupboard with milk reserves every now and then If freaking glancing into the shelf once a day (or more like once a week, because this milk has months of shelf life) in scope of full time office manager job is "a pain", maybe that office manager should rethink their employment there.

Or maybe if putting a piece of paper on someone's desk for precise restocking is too much of "a pain" to the person who drank the milk, then they should rethink their employment there.

The job of the person drinking the milk presumably has nothing to do with moving cards to people's desks. The job of the office manager is literally to keep the milk stocked. When keeping the milk stocked becomes a sidequest for every other employee (who have other jobs to do), what is the office manager actually doing? Bringing the card to the office manager's desk doesn't actually sound much harder than ordering more milk. Why don't we just have the card say, "If you see this card, order more milk" with instructions for how to do that?
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