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!

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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.

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David P Moore's avatar

Reminds me of “The Goal”.

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Boris P.'s avatar

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

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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

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Kent Beck's avatar

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

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Doug Swartz's avatar

What a great analogy.

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

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Isaac Davenport's avatar

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

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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.

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Michał Poczwardowski's avatar

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

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Dave Ferguson'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.

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Denis Baltor's avatar

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

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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. :)

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Shashank Chattopadhyaya's avatar

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

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Jonathan Camenisch's avatar

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

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