2 comments

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  mark howard

  2 years ago

  You make an interesting point about knowledge workers. Our main business is logistics for blue chips. Making sure their customers receive the goods they ordered. Vodafone being a major customer so if you have a Vodafone phone, Unipart got it to you.
  But elements of lean culture, particularly knowledge transfer are equally applicable to programmers. I have very basic IT skills but from what I understand if one of your colleagues has developed a particularly elegant piece of code he or she may then face difficulties in sharing that with everyone in the organisation. In a lean organisation great efforts are made to share knowledge in a structured way so learning in one part can be shared by all and we don't end up spending ages duplicating work already done by a colleague or re-inventing the wheel. That's the problem with most understanding of lean they begin and end with the Toyota Production System. Equally I could argue about policy deployment (Prince II is a version) So there are things about lean which can benefit almost any organisation and we spend a lot of effort in not giving clients the answers but equipping their staff with methodologies and the culture where answers will come from the skills, knowledge and experience of existing staff. A further consequence of this is that staff in such a culture enjoy their work more and are more productive. Management fad? We've grown from almost noting in the third party logistics field to a major player. Could we have done it without our version of lean? Unipart does not believe so.
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  Rogel

  2 years ago

  
  

  <font face="Calibri" size="2">Lean has, without doubts, major advantages over wasteful. A "lean" code is most likely more efficient than a non-lean.
  The problem is the application of some method religiously, far and beyond their limited scope.
  Many years ago when I served in the Israeli army someone, probably a consultant, developed the idea that a division in battle should adopt the TQM methods. The division I served in was chosen to test these methods in its annual maneuvers and we, the officers, sent to learn about how to apply TQM during battle. At the end of the day one of the reserve officer, an old timer that had a lot of experience, stood up and said: " This TQM is very nice but it is unclear to me, does the enemy soldier knows that he has to withdrawal, according to the TQM method, or will he keep fighting?". What he meant, obviously, was that applying manufacturing methods to division in battle is idiotic.</font>

  
  

  <font face="Calibri" size="2">Tellingpeople in the assembly line how to arrange there tools make sense, but it is distractive when applied to programmers. And its seems from the article, and from the responses that you are trying to apply "Lean" methods as a universal solution, at least at my line of business we already know that there are no silver bullets. </font>

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