I can understand it working for a large manufacturing facility, but a custom machine manufacturer,  not so much.

What is muda?


You have weak management

Not you. Look at some of the reactions to my earlier posts about the terminology.

where have I heard that before?

Stupid corporate jargon that reminds me of this:

Heh. At my old agency we got indoctrinated into the Covey "7 Habits..." thing back when it was new. They gave us books and training and planners... Everyone was gung-ho about making ourselves Highly Effective People... 'til they realized that the "work-life balance" thing didn't work in their favor so it got dropped hard.

I think we work for the same company, is that you Buckwheat?

In this thread we learn the difference between using a structured approach to building an efficient reliable supply chain and offshoring everything to the lowest bidder in China.

I'm pretty sure that's all the companies that dabble w/ JIT.  Even GM and Ford w/ the size and scale to push the disadvantages down to their vendors via penalties and contractual requirements, can't get the chips they need to keep things flowing.

I worked for a major snack food company.

They always managed to  hire a new ?? clown who had worked at several different companies previously and arrived at our plant as a outside hire.

Soon they would say hey this "insert name" is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Last thing they did was "Lean" ??

These ?? clowns decided in order to implement  "Lean" they needed a  whole new group of inside and outside hires for the "Lean" team.

6 fucking new positions plus a existing manager to oversee this shit show.

GF guessed on the low side each new position salary cost alone not including benifits  were 75k to 85k per year.

That's over 500k alone in salaries, not including company paid benefits and 401k matches.

We both said how in the hell can you create 6 new positions and  implement "Lean" right after you went negative 1 million right off the bat.

We said the company should have said great idea...fire all the Lean people plus the manager.

Instant cost savings of over 1 million per year every year.

Glad I'm retired, my head would have exploded by now.

Attached File

That's kind of like the nerdy IT turds sending Microsoft updates to me every day.  I don't need all of those fucking updates and no, I have more important things to do then reboot my computer at 2pm everyday.

That's not the point. You figure out your demand and weigh that and your time to reliably replenish to figure out your on hand inventory. Figure out what risks you are willing to assume in regards to loss of production. You don't tie yourself to it like an anchor, oblivious of what is happening.

As soon as the writing was on the wall with the Commie Cough economy, the folks responsible for figuring out the inventory buffers should have jacked them to max and bought up all the parts, spare parts, replacement in kind parts, and like-kind parts.

Is that the program wear you "earn" different color belts like martial arts???  I think our place tried to do it a few years ago but it petered out.

I loved seeing the emails from the obese HR director inviting us to the LEAN meetings, where hot dogs, chips and pop would be served.........

You're wrong, or your company is incredibly lucky.  Someone or some people need to architect the software so that effective sprints can be done.  Agile and scrum boards work much more efficiently if OOPs is used, rather than monolithic code structure.

Lots of companies have folded programming and architecture into the same title (i.e., that person does both). Usually, these are the senior people, not usually the newer H1B programming staff.  It sounds like your company did so, but it cannot be everyone as that is too many cooks brewing QA issues.

That's Six Sigma. Another useful but overused process that shouldn't have grown outside the high volume manufacturing arena.

Unless the distributors went Lean.

When they did it at my shop it was Top Down. Not Bottom up.

If management wasn't on board or untrainable they were gone.

Once management had all their shit together they came down to the floor.

Literally takes years.

Other than the fact that these management methods revolutionized real world businesses and made real world companies hugely productive and competitive, yes, exactly like that.

QFT
also,
/thread

Similar to the Fortune 100 company where I was employed as a Sr. Manager... the upper echelon only provided lip-service only to the "LEAN J.I.T" program.

We were essentially told to make it work.

The "LEAN" process made sense to me, but a combination of less inspired subordinate managers and brain-dead union lackies made the process DOA.

They never learned from the catastrophic  "Teaming Program" failure they pushed years before.

Stupidity reigns supreme in Corporate America... much like Marxism in all layers of government.

Yes, I would agree to a point, but true SS implementation is only a pipe dream! Six Sigma was trademarked by people who were smart enough to market a perceived quick fix for companies with weak Quality systems. If everyone loved one another, there would never be any wars. Unfortunately, you cannot get past personal agendas and SS corrupts the pure science of quality engineering. "Black Belt" and "Master Black Belt” has the stink of a marketing ploy and not quality. SS is not good QE. QE is good QE. If Quality is a religion than SS is a cult. If you want to call it QE then call it QE. Most of us never do, “Six Sigma”, we use proven quality tools, and some have been corrupted into “Six Sigma” strategies.

They probably hurt more companies than they helped.

Not wading into the pissing match, but I attend various hour long weekly and biweekly meetings run by Project Managers that have "Scrum" as part of the title, for discrete projects, where the only part that really matters is hitting the completion milestone

Our parts storeroom went from in the same building, to a warehouse right around the corner, to a warehouse 15 minutes away. Getting parts went from just walking over to the parts room window and telling Erika we needed a part, to a 15 minute turn around time, to 3 hours IF it made it in to the truck and IF the crackheads monitoring one of their 5 different spreadsheets wakes up from his coma in time to see the requested part and decides to act on the request. It gets exponentially more retarded when you consider that that same parts storeroom that once served just one cleanroom is now supplying 3 cleanrooms 60 miles apart, with just 1 truck. All for "cost savings".

There's a difference between figuring out how to make stuff better as efficiently as possible vs. hoping some kaizen will show up in your kanban because you held the correct lean rituals and spoke the right incantations (and pay good money to ensure all of your employees understand they are supposed to play along as devoted cult members).  This is particularly so when people try to apply lean to innovation/research efforts which are by nature a bit messy and inefficient.   Applying lean incorrectly can lead to management bloat and suppression of innovation.

You don't have any idea what you need.
If they're really doing it at 2pm they are idiots.
If they're doing it remotely close to every day, they are idiots.
If they're giving you a choice in rebooting or not, they are also idiots.

Competent IT guy works like so:
Your shit updates and reboots when I say it does, not you. Get cute and turn your computer off when you leave, it'll update when you turn it on in the morning and you can wait for that. I could wake it up overnight and do it then, but you can wait.

@jchewie1

I think you already know this, but that's not Agile.

Its only Agile branded.

I am neither wrong nor incredibly lucky.

The Scrum Guide prescribes that the Scrum team be a complete set of individuals who can deliver a working product. It's cross-functional, meaning there is no separate QA team. Cross-functional also means it has enough senior/experienced people on the Scrum to guide higher level design decisions.

Most importantly, the members of the Scrum team have the authority to make those decisions on their own.

Each Scrum team should be building a valuable product that can't be purchased elsewhere. "Product" here can be an internal app/service just as easily as it could be a customer facing app/service.

If the members of the Scrum team don't have the authority to make their own decisions, you don't have a Scrum team, you have something else that's not Scrum.

The technical members of the Scrum teams should be regularly self-organizing communication with other Scrum teams - both teams whose apps/services they depend on, and teams that depend on their apps/services, and end-users, if the app/service has end-users.

None of that requires a big "A" architect, though the senior/experienced engineers should be regularly communicating with each other and not self-siloed or forcibly siloed by a PMO or PMP.

Big "A" Architects are common in PMO shops that want to or tend to do Big Up Front Design and because the PMPs want someone to blame if there are problems - to ensure the PMP's micromanagement and siloing doesn't get blamed.

Customer interaction and customer collaboration (where "customer" can be an internal team / internal employees) is more important than a Big A Architect.

That is not to say there's no role at all for higher level technical planning and tracking, but it's de-emphasized, and it's not Big Up Front Design followed by rigidly sticking to a Deadline Oriented Project Plan where any tiny variance has to be approved by a PMP.

That's the problem. It became this huge racket like ISO9001 and some other stuff. IF YOU'RE NOT CERTIFIED YOU'RE SHIT! FUCK YOU! More money was probably made selling the training and certs then was saved from the efficiencies of using the process properly.

I know it all too well.  I wouldn't even call it agile branded, it was simply an attempt by the PM to sound smart and up to date.  She has no clue.

Sounds like you got bought out by a private equity firm.

This has been my experience

That'll be your action item.

Congratulations, now you understand how these initiatives work.

Back pre 9-11, I worked in IT and the company I worked for was failing, they sold off most of the product lines I was working on. Sent about half the staff with it. Laid off a bunch of other folks. They kept me for some reason, reassigned me to do a bunch of shit, gave me a supervisor that I hated. And they decide they are going to implement some new ISO standard, because shit like that always saves a fledgling company, right?

I was supposed to be able to recite some kind of company goal and know my specific job duties, fuck I didn't even really know all the details of the job they had given me. They were supposed to interview me over it in a few weeks, my boss came in and started some shit with me. I walked in the next day and turned in my resignation.

A year later they were done. You can't even find a reference to any of their products any more.

And you sit back and look at it, year 2000, our CEO was making $500k a year. We had a couple of VP's pulling in $250k - $300k for a company with less than 100 employees. I could have run that company into the ground for a whole lot less money back then.

This thread is muda, of site resources. Staff is not amused.

...and they are going to funnel what equity is left to their consultant buddies.