B00AZRBLHO EBOK

by Kim, Gene

  He continues, “It was a nightmare everyday. They had inventory piled up to the ceiling. And was there a systematic way to get WIP through the plant? Hell, no! What got worked on was based on who yelled the loudest or most often, who could engineer the best side deals with the expediters, or who could get the ear of the highest ranking executive.”

  Erik is as animated as I’ve ever seen him. “We started restoring sanity when we figured out where our constraint was. Then we protected it, making sure that time on the constraint was never wasted. And we did everything to make sure work flowed through it.”

  Erik then grows still and merely says, “To fix your problem, you need to do a lot more than just learning how to say no. That’s the tip of the iceberg.”

  We all look at him, waiting for him to keep going. But instead, he stands up, walks to his suitcase, and opens it, revealing a jumble of clothes, a snorkel, a garbage bag, and boxer shorts.

  He starts digging, takes out a granola bar, closes the suitcase, and returns to the table.

  We all watch as he opens up the granola bar package and starts eating it.

  Steve, looking as mystified as the rest of us, eventually says, “Erik, that’s an intriguing story. Please keep going.”

  Erik sighs. “No, that’s all I intended to say. If you can’t figure out from that what you need to do, then there’s really not much hope for any of you.”

  Steve slaps the table, exasperated.

  But my mind is racing.

  What we need to do isn’t merely to prioritize better. I’ve already learned what the priorities are, however inconvenient: Phoenix. Making the audit findings go away. All while keeping everything running.

  We think we know where the constraint is. It’s Brent. Brent, Brent, Brent. And we’ve already taken steps to protect Brent from unplanned work.

  I know I can’t hire more resources.

  I also know that the workload in my organization is totally out of control.

  No amount of heroics on my part can make a big dent in the tidal wave of work that’s been allowed to get into the system. Because no one ever said no.

  Our mistakes were made long before it came to me. The mistakes were made by accepting the project and all the resulting shortcuts that Chris had to make before it reached me.

  How can we reverse this insanity?

  Then a strange idea hits me.

  I think about it for another moment. It sounds utterly absurd, yet I can’t find any flaws in the logic.

  I say, “Steve, I have an idea. But please let me finish telling you the entire idea before you react.”

  And I tell them what I’m thinking.

  * * *

  Steve is the first to speak. “You must be out of your goddamned mind,” Steve says, his initial disbelief turning into exasperation. “You want to just stop doing work? Who do you think we are? Subsidized potato farmers paid not to grow crops?”

  But before I can respond, John speaks up. “I agree. Your idea seems like exactly the wrong thing to do. We’ve got a burning platform right now to finally do the right thing. We need to strike while the iron is hot. This is a perfect storm for us to finally get the budget we need to not only do the right things, but do the right things right.”

  He starts rattling off the points on his fingers, “We’ve got the audit finding that has board visibility, the high-visibility project that can’t fail, and an operational failure that can’t happen again, either. We should pour on the gas and put in the security controls we need, once and for all.”

  Wes interjects, chortling to John, “I’m stunned! I thought you would love Bill’s idea. I mean, you love stopping things from getting done and saying no, right? This should be like a dream come true for you!”

  John turns bright red, obviously preparing a scathing reply. But Wes puts his big, meaty hand on his shoulder, and says with a smile, “Hey, I’m just kidding, okay? Just making a joke.”

  Everyone starts talking at once when Erik suddenly stands up, crumples his granola bar wrapper, and throws it across the room into the wastebasket. He leans back in his chair, saying, “Bill, I think your proposal is very astute.”

  Looking at John, he continues, “Remember, Jimmy, the goal is to increase the throughput of the entire system, not just increase the number of tasks being done. And if you don’t have a trustworthy system of work, why should I trust your system of security controls? Bah. A total waste of time.”

  John looks back at Erik, puzzled. “What?”

  Erik sighs and rolls his eyes. Instead of responding to John, he turns his gaze to Steve. “You’ve been a plant manager. Think of it as freezing materials release until enough WIP completes and leaves the plant. In order to control this system, we need to reduce the number of moving parts.”

  When Steve doesn’t appear convinced, Erik leans way forward in his chair and asks him pointedly, “Suppose you’re managing the MRP-8 plant, and you have inventory piled to the ceiling. What would happen if you stopped releasing jobs and materials onto the plant floor?”

  Surprised to be the target of the question, Steve considers it for a moment. “The amount of WIP in the plant goes down, because work will start leaving the plant as finished goods.”

  “Correct,” Erik says, nodding approvingly. “And what will likely happen to due-date performance?”

  “Due-date performance goes up, because WIP went down.” Steve says, looking increasingly suspicious and reluctant about where Erik might be leading him.

  “Yes, very good,” Erik says encouragingly. “But on the other hand, what happens to inventory levels if you allow the plant to continue to accept orders and release new jobs?”

  He says after a moment, “WIP goes up.”

  “Excellent,” Erik says. “And what happens to due-date performance?”

  Steve looks like he’s just swallowed something that isn’t agreeing with him, and he says eventually, “Everyone knows that in manufacturing, as WIP increases, due-date performance goes down.

  “Wait a goddamned minute, here,” he says, squinting at Erik. “You’re not actually suggesting that this applies to IT, too? That by halting all work except for Phoenix, we’ll reduce the amount of WIP in IT, and that this will somehow improve due-date performance? Is that seriously what you’re suggesting?”

  Erik leans back in his chair looking pleased with himself. “Yes.”

  Wes says, “Won’t that leave most of us just twiddling our thumbs with nothing to do? That’s 130 people in IT Operations just sitting around. Doesn’t that sound a bit…wasteful?”

  Erik scoffs and says, “I’ll tell you about wasteful. How about over a thousand changes stuck in the system, with no apparent way of ever getting them completed?”

  Wes frowns. Then he nods, saying, “That’s true. The number of cards on Patty’s change board keeps going up. If that’s work in process, it’s definitely spiraling out of control. We’re probably only a couple weeks away from having those cards stacked to the ceiling, too.”

  I nod. He’s right.

  The idea is for IT Operations and Development to not accept any new projects for two weeks and to stop all work in IT Operations except for work related to Phoenix.

  I look around. “If we single-task on the most important project for two weeks and still aren’t able to make a big dent, then I think we should all find new day jobs.”

  Chris nods. “I think we should give it a shot. We’ll keep working on the other active projects, but we’ll freeze all deployment work except Phoenix. From Bill’s perspective, it will look like that’s the only thing we’re working on. Make no mistake, Phoenix will be everyone’s top priority.”

  Patty and Wes nod in agreement.

  John crosses his arms. “I’m not sure if I can support this insane proposal. First, I’ve never seen any organization do anything even remotely like this before. Second, I’m very concerned that if we do t
his, we’ll lose our shot at getting all the audit issues fixed. As Steve has already said, those audit findings could kill the company, too.”

  “You know what your problem is?” Erik says, pointing a finger at John. “You never see the end-to-end business process, so I guarantee you that many of the controls you want to put in aren’t even necessary.”

  John says, “What?”

  Again, Erik waves John’s question away. “Don’t worry about it for now. Let the inevitable happen, and we’ll see what we can learn from it.”

  Steve turns to John. “I understand your concerns about security. But the biggest risk to the company is not the unresolved audit findings. The biggest risk to the company is that we don’t survive. We need Phoenix to regain competitive parity.”

  He pauses and says, “Let’s give this project freeze one week and see if it makes a difference in the Phoenix work. If we don’t, we’ll put the remediation work back on the front burner. Okay?”

  John nods reluctantly. He then flips to a page in his three-ring binder, and makes some notes. He’s probably recording Steve’s promise.

  “Steve, we definitely need your help to make this happen,” I say. “My guys are routinely strong-armed into doing pet projects by almost every manager in this company. I think we need an e-mail from you to the entire company, not only explaining why you’re doing this, but what the consequences will be if someone tries to put unauthorized work into the system.”

  Erik makes an encouraging noise.

  “No problem,” Steve quickly replies. “I’ll send you all a draft after this meeting. Revise it and I’ll send it out to all the company managers. Good enough for you?”

  Trying to keep the disbelief out of my voice, I say, “Yes.”

  It’s astonishing what we agree to in the next hour. IT Operations will freeze all non-Phoenix work. Development can’t idle the twenty-plus non-Phoenix projects, but will freeze all deployments. In other words, no work will flow from Development to IT Operations for another two weeks.

  Furthermore, we will identify the top areas of technical debt, which Development will tackle to decrease the unplanned work being created by problematic applications in production.

  This will all make a huge difference in my team’s workload.

  Furthermore, Chris and Kirsten will review all Phoenix tasks not being worked, and steal resources from other projects to get them in work again.

  Everyone seems energized and excited to put the plan into place—even John.

  Before we all leave, Steve says, “Thank you all for your good thinking today and for sharing something about yourself. I feel like I know all of you better now. And, as unbelievable as I think Bill’s crazy project freeze idea is, I think it could work. I look forward to this being the first of many great decisions this team will make.

  “As I said, one of my goals is that we create a team where we can all trust one another,” he continues. “Hopefully, we made a small step in that direction, and I encourage you to keep demanding honest and truthful communications between you.”

  He looks around the room and asks, “Is there anything that you guys need from me in the meantime?”

  There are no requests, so we adjourn.

  As we all get up to leave, Erik says loudly, “Great work, Bill. Couldn’t have done it better myself.”

  Chapter 20

  • Friday, September 26

  Three days later, I’m at my desk, trying to read a report on Phoenix progress from Kirsten on my laptop. As it whirs and wheezes, I wonder how many weeks it’s been since John’s security patch bricked my laptop.

  Getting replacement laptops is like a lottery. It’s tempting to bribe one of the service desk people, as one of the Marketing managers suggested, but I refuse to jump the queue. I have to keep playing by the rules since I’m the person responsible for making and enforcing them. I make a note to talk with Patty about our urgent need to reduce lead times on these laptop replacements.

  Finally, the e-mail comes up:

  From: Kirsten Fingle

  To: Steve Masters,

  Cc: Bill Palmer, Chris Allers, Sarah Moulton

  Date: September 26, 10:33 AM

  Subject: Great news on project front!

  Steve,

  We are finally making headway. The project freeze and the resulting IT focus on Phoenix has broken the logjam. We’ve accomplished more in the previous seven days that we typically get done in an entire month.

  Kudos to everyone on the team!

  On a side note: many project sponsors are very frustrated about their projects being put on hold. In particular, Sarah Moulton believes that her projects are exempt from the freeze. I referred her to you.

  Attached is the formal status report. Please let me know if you have any questions.

  Kirsten

  Although the note about Sarah making trouble again makes my jaw clench, this is absolutely fantastic news.

  We were expecting it, but the good news is welcome, nonetheless, especially after earlier in the week. We had a big setback because of a Sev 1 incident that took out all the internal phone and voicemail systems, bringing Sales and Manufacturing to its knees on the last day of the quarter.

  Two hours into the outage, we discovered it was caused by one of our networking vendors who accidentally made a change to our production phone system instead of the hot spare.

  The outage will impact our quarterly revenue, but we don’t know how much yet. In order to prevent this from happening again, we’re putting together a project to monitor our critical systems for unauthorized changes.

  This monitoring project is what Wes, Patty, and John are talking about, huddled around Patty’s conference table.

  I say, “Sorry to interrupt, but I wanted to share the good news.” I show them Kirsten’s e-mail.

  Wes leans back and says, “Well, that makes it official. Your project freeze is actually working.”

  Patty looks over at him, appearing surprised. “You actually doubted it? Come on, we’ve both been talking about how we’ve never seen people so focused before. It’s amazing how the project freeze has reduced the priority conflicts and bad multitasking. We know it’s made a huge difference in productivity.”

  Wes shrugs then smiles. “Until Kirsten gives us credit, it’s all just in our heads.”

  He’s got a point. It really is great to have Kirsten acknowledge the progress we’re making.

  “By the way,” Patty says, “She’s is not kidding about the business managers freaking out. I’ve had more and more VPs calling me, demanding a waiver for their various pet projects or asking to get some work done off the books. It’s not just Sarah—she’s just the most blatant and vocal.”

  I frown. “Okay, that’s part of our job and we expected this. But, I don’t want this kind of pressure being applied to any of our people. Wes?”

  “I’ve told everyone on my team that they’re to route any complaints to me. And trust me, I call each of those guys back and give them an earful,” he says.

  Patty says, “I’m already getting anxious about what we do after we lift the project freeze. Won’t that be like opening up the floodgates?”

  Once again, she has put her finger on something important. I say, “I’ll call Erik, but before I do, how do we currently prioritize our work? When we commit to work on a project, a change, a service request, or anything else, how does anyone decide what to work on at any given time? What happens if there are competing priorities?”

  “That happens every freaking day!” says Wes, looking incredulous. “That’s what’s so great about freezing all the projects except for one. No one has to decide what they’re working on. No multitasking allowed.”

  “That’s not my question,” I say. “When we have multiple streams of work going on simultaneously, how does anyone decide what needs to get worked on at any given time?”

&n
bsp; “Well,” Wes says, “we trust them to make the right decision, based on the data they have. That’s why we hire smart people.”

  This is not good.

  Recalling my twenty minutes observing Brent before the project freeze, I ask, “And on what data do all our smart people base their prioritization decisions?”

  Wes says defensively, “We all try to juggle the competing priorities as best as we can. That’s life, right? Priorities change.”

  “Let’s be honest,” Patty says. “Priority 1 is whoever is yelling the loudest, with the tie-breaker being who can escalate to the most senior executive. Except when they’re more subtle. I’ve seen a bunch of my staff always prioritizing a certain manager’s requests, because he takes them out to lunch once a month.”

  Oh, great. In addition to some engineers being bullied, I have other engineers who are like Corporal Max Klinger from M*A*S*H, running their own black market of IT work.

  “If this is true, there’s no way we can lift the project freeze. Don’t you see that we don’t have any way of releasing work into IT and be able to trust that it will get worked on?”

  Trying to keep the resignation out of my voice, I say, “Patty is right. We have a lot to figure out before the project freeze ends. Which is in exactly one week.”

  * * *

  I decide to take a quick walk outside. I have thirty minutes before my next meeting, and I need to think.

  I’m more unsettled than ever. When we have more than one project in the system at the same time, how do we protect the work from being interrupted or having its priority trumped by almost anyone in the business or someone else in IT?

  The sun shines down on me. It’s 11 a.m., and the air smells like autumn. The leaves on the trees are starting to turn orange and brown, and there are piles of them starting to form in the parking lot.