16 Comments
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Jesse Ogburn's avatar

My dad's classic phrase is "when we get caught up". 20+ years later he's still stressed about getting "caught up". This is exactly why it will never happen!

David P Moore's avatar

I had a friend who used to say all the time - “when I get organized…” I always wondered when that would happen and what it would look like. We were both single and lived in studio apartments with little to no stuff.

David P Moore's avatar

Reminds me of “The Goal”.

Boris P.'s avatar

I also had to immediately think of the theory of constraints 😁

Markus Trachsel's avatar

Improvement that do not impact the whole process are not improvements. They create new bottlenecks. The Goal and the phoenix project

Kent Beck's avatar

You know that. I know that. Why do _they_ act like they don’t know that?

Doug Swartz's avatar

What a great analogy.

This reminds me of a saying."end to end is always farther than you think".

Isaac Davenport's avatar

I thought immediately of Goldratt as well when I saw this post.

Vinicius Policena's avatar

The first idea that pops after reading: you REALLY have to know what you're doing to introduce parallelism/concurrency smartly.

Michał Poczwardowski's avatar

One of the best introductions to Systems Thinking that I've read.

MetalMonkey's avatar

There's a few thoughts going round my head on this one, firstly, always look for the level of the system before optimising around bottlenecks and secondly, there is **always** a outer system populated by customers and maybe two within that, wants and needs.

Denis Baltor's avatar

Thanks for the great analogy. That’s why I like working in pull-based systems, like Kanban.

Ben Martin's avatar

Maybe the answer is to add fun animatronics to the line like an ammusement bark. Cheaper way to solve the complaining than another oven. :)

Shashank Chattopadhyaya's avatar

A very good example of the futility of locally improving the steps that are not the constraint!

Jonathan Camenisch's avatar

"The PYP System." Good term for the lexicon.