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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)

#51

Post by MisterMower »

> I then watched the first welder begin to peel the protective plastic coating off the bumper in the places he had to weld. It took a good bit of time picking with his fingernails to get it done.

Seems like this whole step could be eliminated if they only protected the areas that weren’t going to be welded. You don’t care about cosmetic damage to surfaces you’re going to weld on. Just be smarter about where you put the plastic.

There might be good reasons why they did that though. My experience in factory settings is that there is always a reason. It’s just sometimes a really dumb one.

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

#53

Post by xyzelement »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #37
xyzelement wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> In this story, the consultant found a way to remove stupid/low-skilled work from the welders' todo. > I suspect a welder prefers to weld. The consultant found a way to let welders do what they chose/are trained to do, which is weld. That's right. An, on a semi-related tangent, it's ironic how a lot of what software industry does is add stupid/low-skilled or mismatched work to specialists' todo . Consider the "offic…

That's very interesting, but I think there's also an element of "democratization" here that you aren't touching on. In the past, the number of employees in the org that would use a secretary or graphics team was low as a percentage.

Like, today a junior dev can be called on to do a demo to another team, and he can easily throw some slides together. It's not like 50 years ago he would have had the in-house design team on hand to do slides, he'd just not be presenting.

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

#54

Post by nerdponx »

giorgosts wrote: post #44

Bullshit story the consultant made up to bolster his point (93% efficiency claim from a foreman wtf). Of course finding some help moving parts around for the welders would be the first thing the foreman would think of, because thats what foremans do all the time in factories. Maybe the welders chose to work this way (i.e. inefficiently) because continuous welding produces fatigue which risks H&S and lowers the qualit…

That literally is the solution they landed on: they hired helpers, i.e. extra personnel.

The critical difference is that they did not need to hire more welders, buy more welding equipment, set up more welding stations.

I don't care if the story came right out of Aesop's fables, because it's a good story and it makes a good point.

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

#55

Post by nerdponx »

anenefan wrote: post #41

I know most people are gushing with positives ... but to me this reads like the epitome of a clueless consultant who got lucky because the 30 plus years manager missed the basics ... unless the era of the tale was early 60s or something or some middle of nowhere fabrication that sprang up with little idea of how other similar places work ... um great story but what really was this based on. In the industry it's fairl…

To be fair, the situation in the story truly does happen in a variety of jobs and businesses.

What you are highlighting is the countervailing lesson, kind of a specialization of Chesterton's fence: if highly experienced people are doing a process in what seems to be an inefficient manner, consider that it might actually be the most efficient manner, given constraints that you do not fully understand or are not aware of.

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

#56

Post by nerdponx »

hn_go_brrrrr wrote: post #28
vivegi wrote: 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).

If your specialist employees are spending their time doing non-specialist work, then perhaps you have not set them up to work efficiently.

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

#57

Post by xyzelement »

sitkack wrote: post #23
xyzelement wrote: post #21

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…

Thanks for this and the couple other comments in this thread. I get where you are coming from. First, I agree on the level that, let's say, "non-glamorous" work is important. So I didn't mean that the work of lifting bumpers to the station is stupid itself (it's necessary and someone has to do it) but that it's stupid for the welding specialists to do it.

But I am not sure the other axes you have to grind here. A surgeon and a janitor are both necessary to the functioning of a hospital, but obviously and not-controversially the surgeon is a lot less fungible. Like, in a pinch, you could ask patient's families to clean the toilet in the hospital room, but you wouldn't ask them to do the surgery.

And more obviously, if people were dying in the ER because the surgeons were busy cleaning the toilets, that would indeed be stupid.

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

#58

Post by xyzelement »

thinkmcfly wrote: post #22
xyzelement wrote: post #21

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.

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

Like I try not to get hung up on language but "value/productivity" and "leeches" are essentially antonyms.

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

#59

Post by TeMPOraL »

xyzelement wrote: post #53
TeMPOraL wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In this story, the consultant found a way to remove stupid/low-skilled work from the welders' todo. > I suspect a welder prefers to weld. The consultant found a way to let welders do what they chose/are trained to do, which is weld. That's right. An, on a semi-related tangent, it's ironic how a lot of what software industry does is add stupid/low-skilled or mismatched work to specialists' todo . Consider the "offic…

That's very interesting, but I think there's also an element of "democratization" here that you aren't touching on. In the past, the number of employees in the org that would use a secretary or graphics team was low as a percentage. Like, today a junior dev can be called on to do a demo to another team, and he can easily throw some slides together. It's not like 50 years ago he would have had the in-house design team…

That's a good point, but then, what does said junior dev accomplish with those slides, that they couldn't do without them? It's not like slides are improving communications much (some would say they're hindering it[0]), not relative to e.g. sketches on a flip chart.

I think this is another example of a problem I'm hinting at: the reason said junior dev has to make slides is because they can. If their only option was to ask the in-house design team for help, nobody would expect them to show up with pretty-ish slides. But, because PowerPoint makes it easy for anyone to do slides on their own, everyone now has to - much like Word making it easy to write reports and letters means everyone now has to.

--

[0] - https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint

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

#60

Post by xyzelement »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #59
xyzelement wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very interesting, but I think there's also an element of "democratization" here that you aren't touching on. In the past, the number of employees in the org that would use a secretary or graphics team was low as a percentage. Like, today a junior dev can be called on to do a demo to another team, and he can easily throw some slides together. It's not like 50 years ago he would have had the in-house design team…

That's a good point, but then, what does said junior dev accomplish with those slides, that they couldn't do without them? It's not like slides are improving communications much (some would say they're hindering it[0]), not relative to e.g. sketches on a flip chart. I think this is another example of a problem I'm hinting at: the reason said junior dev has to make slides is because they can . If their only option was…

On the point that not every presentation needs a deck, I completely agree with you. So if an individual is abusing slides (or another tool) "just because" - that's bad but perhaps a different problem than what we started to talk about.

On the flip side, I've occasionally been really impressed by the quality of decks I've seen from developers. Not talking about looks-wise (that helps but especially not holding devs to doing that perfectly) but to actually using these materials to support their point and drive results. And I feel like that wouldn't have happened before.

I think our argument is essentially this: in the olden days, cars came with chauffeurs. Now, most people drive themselves. On one hand, that's an artifact of how many more people can afford a car. On the other hand, they can drive themselves to a stupid place. Both are true.

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