Milk Kanban

> Bringing the card to the office manager's desk doesn't actually sound much harder than ordering more milk.

Bringing the card takes 5 minutes, 10 if you include time to a joke like "We are drinking too much milk, we should buy a cow next year."

Buying the milk includes going to the shop or calling the correct provider. Not the provider you used until two month ago because they usually deliver the requests too late at 5:05 when everyone is going home. Are you paying with the company card or your card and get reimbursed or they have to send an invoice and get paid later? Does the invoice need a magic tax number? Ensure they security guy and the payments department know about this so there are no surprise. [1] [2] This looks like half on hour at least.

When someone ask me to implement a trivial feature in software, I estimate "4 hours". Open the editor, find the correct file, take a look, make the obvious change, run the automated test, fix the obvious bug, cross the fingers, run the test again, [does it need new tests?,] write a nice commit message, google how "thoughtfully" is spelled, commit the change, close the editor, and it's done. Probably 2 hours, but I prefer to say for 4 hour in case there is a surprise.

[1] How many milks? 1%? 2%? 3%? Which brand? This may be included in the instructions, but in the second week of December you may want to buy less, and if there is a discount you may want more.

[2] Do you piggy back cookies or soap?

They probably want to check anyway to see if anything else is getting low (or ran out because a note wasn't delivered) to decrease the number of restocking orders placed. The notes just help indicate when an order needs to be placed earlier than expected.

>On the other hand, knowledge work typically handles uncertainty and variability of work way better.

I am not sure that is true, they are very different but I wouldn't say one handles it better.

One of the factories in involved in builds to order on a short lead time. We produce 2500 machines a day, from a wide range with many configuration options. There are various sub assemblies that have to be built first. On any given day there will be shortages on various components, meaning we can't build what we want. There will be quality issues with materials meaning reworks and changes in process. There will be design up-issues to address material changes, firmware problems, or customer demands. There are 400+ people to coordinate. This is all done whilst still shipping 99.9% within the lead time. We don't know anything for certain about our demand in 10 days time. It seems much more complex and adaptable to me than when I ran a software team

Appreciate thinking of problems that might have made it work not so well.

Having said that, the office is a single floor. The grocery order is once every few weeks.

There's quite some time flexibility in ordering stuff.

There is plan B (buying a couple of cartons in a grocery shop on the same block).

The system is scaled to what we need. And I don't say anyone should copy it blindly. If we talked about several floors, multiple coffee corners, etc., the flow of index cards might have required much more conscious thought.

In our case, we need none of this.

Also, continuous improvement (kaizen): start with something simple, then improve it. There's not much point in solving hypothetical problems with system design. Most of the time, we'd only be unnecessarily complicating the solution.

Which (tongue in cheek) is half of the history of software development :)

Oh, there is a real Kasia. Although she's a person of many talents, I would be genuinely surprised if she spent evenings studying Japanese management methods.

The solution she designed, however, is as if she already knew all of that part of the MBA program :)

Which shows how significant parts of these methods have roots in basic awareness and perceptiveness to how the work gets done. Lean/Agile only codified some of these good practices. Unfortunately, they also petrified a lot of specific techniques. But that's another story.