Theory Of Constraints, Lean and Schnitzels
Roy gave me a copy of “The Cash Machine” Using the ToC for Sales Management. It is a good read, and it reminded me of the principals I learnt several years ago, although this book had a nice twist, and applied the ToC on a human process instead of the normal production line. (There are also bits that can apply to SW Development but I’ll save that for another post).
What is interesting is that I keep on seeing these pattern. I was making Schnitzels (breaded chicken) for dinner today and my kids where helping me (and fighting over who gets to stand closest to me, but lets ignore that part for now).
Making schnitzels, has a few stages.
- Cut chicken breast into small pieces (I did this)
- Put beaten eggs in a bowl of (my kids did this)
- Put bread crumbs and spices on a plate (my kids did this)
- Heat up oil in a pan (I did this)
Now comes the fun bit, each piece must be dipped in the egg, then in the bread crumbs, then cooked in oil until it is ready. My kids started to dip and coat the chicken and I put it in the oil, but very soon the pan was full and the coated pieces started piling up.
I started teaching my kids about lean and about not having any waste and I showed them that the piled up pieces are making it harder to cook, they where taking up room and where in the way and basically making a whole mess out of it. So we decided that we can only have 8 coated pieces (enough to fill the pan) waiting and that once we get there we just stop (and play with the tap water or quarrel).
Then I used the second step of the Theory of constraints and tried to exploit the constraint. By moving the pieces closer and by adjusting the heat we could get 12 pieces in the pan. Now we can change our lean constraints and allow 12 free pieces. I explained this and quite soon we completed the cooking.
So Lean and Theory of Constraints play well together. We had a great meal and learnt some process theories on the way.
.
2 Comments to “Theory Of Constraints, Lean and Schnitzels”
Recent Posts
- Top 5 questions to ask when checking references
- Unacceptable: Unit testing will take 20 years to catch on
- The 4 reasons why we DIDN’T choose Oslo
- Typemock Academy Launch
- The First Rule to Software Craftsmanship
Categories
- .NET Tests
- Agile
- Code Integrity
- Community
- Debugging
- Fun
- Management for Geeks
- Marketing
- Product
- Release
- Reviews
- SharePoint
- TDD
- Time Management
- Uncategorized
- Unit Tests
Archives
- August 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- December 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
While I certainly appreciate your adaptation of these principals to everyday situations, I do believe that whooshing noise you hear, is all of the fun being sucked out of what would otherwise be a great deal of fun for your children.
What’s next? A dissertation on chaos theory whilst playing Pooh sticks?….LOL
Yup,
I had the feeling that I am taking my work back home.
Nope, the whooshing noise was the kids unplugging the dishwasher, and there is no need to play Pooh stick to prove the chaos theory, just take a peep at the kids room…