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“Blue Light” creating capacity for nothing (2007)

theoryofconstraints.blogspot.com

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Re: “Blue Light” creating capacity for nothing (2007)

#21
post #20

The article's story anecdote of "blue light" is about finding the true value in a process. Blue light means the welder is actually creating value in the product. Anything else in the process does not help build value to the product. It is all non-value added activities. The non-value added activities might be necessary such as setup, delivery, reposition or what not but it doesn't drive value. By maximizing the blue…

Those are things are also necessary, they just don't require a welder to do them. All the talk of "value" will pollute your thinking and encourage you to be a productivity and value bigot.

Can you explain what you mean by "productivity and value bigot?"

In my mind productivity and value generation are major virtues that benefit the doer and society, big "bigot" has a negative connotation and I don't understand how it goes together.

Re: “Blue Light” creating capacity for nothing (2007)

#22
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are things are also necessary, they just don't require a welder to do them. All the talk of "value" will pollute your thinking and encourage you to be a productivity and value bigot.

Can you explain what you mean by "productivity and value bigot?" In my mind productivity and value generation are major virtues that benefit the doer and society, big "bigot" has a negative connotation and I don't understand how it goes together.

Like a VC for instance. They are blood sucking leeches upon our society

Re: “Blue Light” creating capacity for nothing (2007)

#23
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are things are also necessary, they just don't require a welder to do them. All the talk of "value" will pollute your thinking and encourage you to be a productivity and value bigot.

Can you explain what you mean by "productivity and value bigot?" In my mind productivity and value generation are major virtues that benefit the doer and society, big "bigot" has a negative connotation and I don't understand how it goes together.

Devaluing anything that isn't what the executive considers value. One wants optimize systems, not just increase the duty cycle of the thing that is expensive. By focusing on the only thing that one considers "adding value", the "non-value add" tasks and positions become viewed as low quality, low skilled and fungible.

The person who fills and jigs the welder's pipeline is just as valuable from a systems perspective as the welders.

Re: “Blue Light” creating capacity for nothing (2007)

#24
post #8

Where's the part where the welders start doing needless welding to satisfy the helper's target? Or is the point that a good consultant knows to leave before that happens?

Your comment reads like you have an ax to grind against consultants and have a foregone conclusion separate from the content? In this story, the consultant found a way to remove stupid/low-skilled work from the welders' todo. They no longer have to lift shit, take off their gear, and peel plastic off parts. None of that sounds fun and presumably welders are happy not to be doing that. I suspect a welder prefers to we…

> remove stupid/low-skilled work

This is an example of what I mentioned in my other comment.

Re: “Blue Light” creating capacity for nothing (2007)

#25
post #6

This reminds me of the fight I had to hire an Infrastructure Engineer (they call them DevOps, these days). It was like pulling teeth, but, in fairly short order, the chap I hired became the most popular member of the team.

I had to beg for a simple server to separate staging and customers demos once, that were jamming up half a day a week. The official request I made said the server would pay for itself in eight weeks. I think the boss finally understood why I was being so grumpy about it at that point. Or maybe you could just trust the people you claim to trust.

Persuasively communicating cost-savings in a budget increase request?

I'm so sorry to inform you, but you have management written on you.

(But in all seriousness, communication is an important management skill, it's good you explained it so directly, but ideally a manager would communicate back-and-forth without needing to be spoonfed all at once.)

Re: “Blue Light” creating capacity for nothing (2007)

#26

It's incredible that one person was able to handle all the work that took up 90% of the welders time. Lots of time must have been spent getting in and out of gear. I’d expect that one guy to end up the bottleneck and the welders to be waiting for him to bring them parts, but it says he even as time to peel the plastic! I imagine the blue light applied to programming would be a crude tool. I want to hear keys clacking…

So the derivation of Eli Goldratt’s ideas for programming is necessarily different because we are doing artisanal work rather than manufacturing. But yes taken naively it is a measure of Git commits merged into the main branch after running precommit checks and tests and code review and whatever else, and ideally shipping to prod directly. And this is where you want to enable the ability to ship broken code without breaking prod (feature toggles are super handy for this)... This speeds the code review time for example, “oh all that stuff is behind a feature toggle, we won't ship it until it's ready.”

A better derivation of Eli's ideas ultimately causes your entire team to work on one feature before deploying another before deploying another. Sprint planning is “what do we want to take on next, how are we separating it across the team, and how will we pass the baton?” The relay-race baton-pass becomes the crucial concept, whoever has the baton is expected to be working 100% on this thing and only this thing, anyone who does not have the baton is either meant to be preparing to receive the baton, or else they are free to work on whatever refactoring or bug-fixing or side-feature or user support or whatever needs to be done. They are the equivalent of this non-welder helping out. And this is also why it's important for the baton to pass from person to person, because it can be exhausting to hold the baton for too long: what do you call someone who sprints for an hour—a jogger.

This also unlocks the true value of daily standup, which is the person with the baton telling everybody else what they need in order to be successful, and the person who is about to receive the baton to be aware about the timescale at which they have to drop everything else they are doing and work 100% on the next part of the sprint, and the rest of the team checking in on the personal health of the person who has the baton, making sure that they are not overworking themselves to death. Are you okay?

What's at stake is covered in Goldratt’s book Critical Chain, that in a “project context” there is a complex network of dependencies, including hidden ones that come from the raw logical fact that one person can't be working on two different parts at the same time, and the constraint, the thing that actually needs to be tracked and preserved is temporal safety buffer. The default state for a project is that if a step is completed late, that delay has passed on to the next step, but if a step is completed early, that advantage is not communicated to the next step because the person working on the next step isn't ready to drop everything and start working on the project yet.

I actually use these principles to manage the cooking of Thanksgiving meals for our family. My wife was very upset the first time I did it because there was a lot of drawing graphs and stuff, a bunch of diagrams, I had never done it before. But now she wants me to do it every year because it is absolutely intoxicating for her to ask me “what should I be doing right now?” and for me to reply “ nothing, you should rest, but in about 30 minutes you are going to have to drop whatever you are doing and put together everything for the corn casserole.”

That this is how it works should not shock us, not those of us working in web development. Everybody here who works in web development should understand that you overprovision your servers and 90% of the time. They don't do anything. That's not for no reason, it's not because we're wasteful, it because it gives us a much better latency on our incoming requests. Making it clear what the Sprint goal is, and whose shoulders that goal is currently falling upon, is part of making a very low latency system which can respond to whatever fires occur on a day-to-day basis while still getting these longer term projects done ahead of schedule. 80% of the team should be resting or dealing with the latest crisis while one person is legit sprinting on the Sprint goal, and progress on a feature should never have to stall just because the sprinter's significant other is suddenly in the hospital: the feature was owned by the team and the whole team needs to be able to work on it, with everybody checking their work in daily and everybody willing to help out to make the group's deadlines.

I've kind of given the sales pitch for it so let me give one major limitation, a lot of our current methodology is structured in order to identify underperforming people by concrete metrics like how many features they complete, how many story points are those features, and the above methodology kind of creates a space where people can hide: they never take the baton so they never are really in the hot seat, but the whole group takes credit for the success of their individuals. Random assignment and pair programming are one mechanism to rectify the concern and then rectify an obvious concern with that solution (“what if we give a frontend task to a backend programmer?”—answer is, they should do the frontend task, but as the person holding the baton they are running the show and thus entitled to say “I want help, can someone who knows more about frontend code pair with me so that I can just ask “how do I do that in the browser?”).

Re: “Blue Light” creating capacity for nothing (2007)

#27
post #11
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More likely the consultant helped them learn that now that they're so efficient, they can downsize the welding team.

That was my first thought: rather than three or more welders welding ~10% of the time, they needed a team of helpers setting things up, and a single welder moving quickly from job to job...

Yup. A welder's helper is a lot cheaper than a welder, not to mention all the gear time that produces no value for anyone. You want to set things up to the high skill workers are as much as possible able to spend their time on the high skill task.

Re: “Blue Light” creating capacity for nothing (2007)

#28
post #3

Great article. It is almost always the case that we live under "assumed constraints". Most of the time when we question the underlying assumptions we are able to break the constraint or relax it to obtain a better solution. The Goal, by Eliyahu M. Goldratt is highly recommended for understanding Theory of Constraints told from the view of a fictional plant manager.

I read that, having received a similar recommendation, but after I finished it I had no idea how to translate that into my own job (I do not manage a factory).

Re: “Blue Light” creating capacity for nothing (2007)

#29
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain what you mean by "productivity and value bigot?" In my mind productivity and value generation are major virtues that benefit the doer and society, big "bigot" has a negative connotation and I don't understand how it goes together.

Devaluing anything that isn't what the executive considers value. One wants optimize systems, not just increase the duty cycle of the thing that is expensive. By focusing on the only thing that one considers "adding value", the "non-value add" tasks and positions become viewed as low quality, low skilled and fungible. The person who fills and jigs the welder's pipeline is just as valuable from a systems perspective a…

Neglecting the person who fills the jigs will lead to less ur time in the long run though.

I'm guessing your issue is not with those that are fixated on productivity, but those that are just poorly educated in the complexity of how to calculate it.

Re: “Blue Light” creating capacity for nothing (2007)

#30
post #3

Great article. It is almost always the case that we live under "assumed constraints". Most of the time when we question the underlying assumptions we are able to break the constraint or relax it to obtain a better solution. The Goal, by Eliyahu M. Goldratt is highly recommended for understanding Theory of Constraints told from the view of a fictional plant manager.

I read that, having received a similar recommendation, but after I finished it I had no idea how to translate that into my own job (I do not manage a factory).

What’s the thing that adds value to your customer? What is the part they’re actually paying for?

How much of your time is spent on that thing/those things?

How much is spent on other things and how can you reduce that, especially for any resources that are your constrained (rate-limiting) resources?

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