Sometimes, Jasmine wished she were a bit less ambitious. Ambition had got her through high school when most of her siblings dropped out and had got her a supervisor’s position at the largest pulp and paper mill around, not long after she turned 21. Ambition was the reason she read business books in her spare time, looking for things she could use to make her team even more productive and efficient. But ambition had also pushed her to implement some of these ideas before she was really sure how they worked, and, currently, ambition was making her look foolish.
Jasmine led the coating team in the finishing department of the mill. ‘Finishing’ in this context referred to the processes that turned raw paper or paperboard into products with different surfaces, thicknesses, coatings, shapes, and sizes. She had decided that this was the perfect place to implement some of the ideas in a book she had read called ‘The Goal’, and she had managed to persuade the department manager and the other team leaders to let her try them out. She had identified a constraint, figured out how to schedule it, and realised that they needed to control the release of jobs to make it all work properly.
This was all well and good, but it wasn’t helping as much as Jasmine had hoped it would. Having a constraint and scheduling it was supposed to make lead times shorter but, instead, they were getting even more unpredictable! At first, Jasmine had been very firm that her team members should only work on jobs that had gone through the correct release process. Following a detailed investigation, it became clear to Jasmine that somehow, her team always seemed to be busy, despite the work-in-progress they were allowed to advance being limited. In a review with one of the other team leaders, it was pointed out that the reduced number of startable jobs meant that her team members were deliberately working slower than they really could, which meant that efficiencies and output rates in her team looked terrible! Making matters worse, the finishing department manager had already started talking about transferring some of Jasmine’s team to other departments, and all in all, Jasmine was starting to look like an overeager idiot.
That hurt because while Jasmine might be ambitious, she didn’t think she was actually an idiot. While she paused to figure out how to get efficiencies and output rates all going the right way, she decided to change her instructions to her team. If they ran out of scheduled jobs, they could make a start on future unscheduled work. There were always jobs to make a head start on, after all, and it didn’t do any harm to push some products into stock if there wasn’t a job that called for them right now.
That instruction was now causing its own set of issues, however. Having team members working on unscheduled jobs meant that they weren’t always available when a scheduled job reached them. The effect of that was an increase processing delays, degrading delivery on-time performance. All because when things got finished depended on when a team member became available to do their part of the scheduled job. Any and all delays added up. It was all a huge mess… and again, it made Jasmine look like an idiot, although for a different reason, which didn’t help Jasmine feel any better about the situation.
She complained about it one evening to her older brother Kamal. “I don’t know what to do,” she sighed. “I need to manage my team effectively, and everyone agrees that we’re going to keep gating the release of jobs to the finishing department. For that to work, we need stable internal lead times, so I can only let my team start jobs that have already been released. Makes sense, right?”
Kamal nodded. “I’m following so far,” he said.
“Right,” Jasmine continued, “but when I do that, people in my team go idle sometimes and then the manager wants to transfer them to other teams which aren’t idle. If that happens, I won’t have enough team members to deal with the backlog the big jobs cause when they arrive for coating!”
Kamal frowned. “Sounds like you shouldn’t do that, then,” he suggested. “You need to keep those people in your team, so don’t let them go idle. Find something else for them to do.”
Jasmine glared at him. “Yeah, and then they’re in the middle of something else when another batch of product for coating arrives! which means I can’t tell people when the job will be finished, as the lead times stop being stable, and the whole point of my project collapses. We can’t schedule the release of jobs correctly if we don’t know how long the blasted things will take, and we can’t schedule the constraint, which means my entire forecast output collapses, and I look like an idiot. Again.” She concluded moodily.
Kamal thought for a moment. “Right… so, you need to keep your people busy, but not have them actually be busy.” “If this is going to be another complicated philosophy joke, just keep it to yourself,” Jasmine growled. “Seriously, Kamal, this is a problem! I’ve got ambitions, right? I don’t want to be a team leader forever! I want to go to management school! How can I do that if I can’t even make this work?”
“You might be surprised,” Kamal shrugged. “Lots of people go to management school who haven’t done what you’ve achieved already… but that’s not the point. Look, you want your team to be idle when they run out of released jobs so that they’re available to work at full speed as soon as another job reaches them. It’s like that cartoon, right? The roadrunner goes at full speed when he’s running, but as soon as he stops, he’s perfectly still. The same thing applies to your team.”
“What it sounds like,” Kamal continued, “is that your people are worried about what will happen if they go idle. So, when there are released jobs for them to work on, they go slow which pads out the time between jobs. And honestly, I don’t blame them. All their experience has been that workers who go idle get into trouble, or get given something else to do, or both. So, of course, they find ways to look busy, and of course, that stuffs up all your clever planning, and either lead times blow out or you can’t get hold of your people when you need them.”
Kamal sat back, looking pleased with himself. “Man, that sounded pretty smart! I should write some of this stuff down, maybe I could get it into one of those books you read!”
“Only if you provide solutions as well as problems,” Jasmine muttered, “because I think most of us could write a book that was full of problems. What we need are answers!”
“OK,” Kamal nodded, “let’s look at some answers. To start with, do your team members actually know that you’re expecting them to run out of work sometimes? And that it’s actually a good thing, and what you want to happen?”
Jasmine opened her mouth to answer and then closed it again, thinking hard. “I… don’t think they do,” she admitted. “I don’t think I’ve ever told them that… I just sort of assumed that they would be OK with it.”
“Right,” Kamal said, “that’s something you can start with. Tell them what you expect to happen, and why it’s a good thing because at the moment they naturally think they should avoid it.”
“OK,” Jasmine said slowly. “I need to prove that I’m serious about it too, don’t I? Whenever someone does finish a task and goes, let’s call it available-to-start, I need to congratulate them, be pleased about it, that sort of thing. I should probably call it being on standby too, rather than saying that they’re idle – ‘idle’ just gives the wrong idea.”Kamal shrugged. “Yeah, probably,” he said. “Keep on pointing out the benefits of them being on standby, too, and try to remove any reasons they have to keep busy.”
Jasmine nodded firmly. “OK, I can do that,” she said. “The hard bit is going to be protecting them from being reassigned, though. The department manager has already made noises about that.” “Hmm…” Kamal thought for a moment, then leaned forward. “You know, it would probably be easier if you could prove the benefits of keeping them on standby. Is there a way you could do that?”
“Yes, there is!” Jasmine exclaimed. “I mean, the entire point of this is to reduce the time it takes to get jobs through my team and onto the next stage in the finishing process. We’ve got records of the time jobs spend with each of the finishing department teams, and I’ll bet they’ll show an improvement once this starts working properly. I can dig them out, that way at least I’ll have some evidence the next time the department manager starts grumbling about people going idle – sorry, on standby.” “Good plan,” Kamal agreed. “OK, there’s some answers for you. Try them out and let me know what happens. “I will,” Jasmine promised. “Thanks for your help!”
Over the next few weeks, Jasmine put into action all the things she had talked about with Kamal. She got her team together and told them the reasons why they might run out of work, that it was deliberate and why, and that she was fine with it – in fact, she encouraged it, as long as they were all like roadrunners! Whenever someone did go onto standby, she congratulated them and praised them for it, and it wasn’t long before she discovered that some of her team had started a little informal competition about who ‘achieved standby’ the most in a week. It was easy to find someone when a new job was released, and lead times stabilised and reduced again as the delays between one person finishing and the next person starting halved.
Jasmine also found the records of her team jobs’ elapsed time. Even though she had only implemented this ‘roadrunner’ system recently, the reduction in the time spent with her team was noticeable – and it improved even more as she got better at managing standby tasks. When the department manager called a meeting with all the team leaders to talk about reassigning people between teams, Jasmine was able to prove that her system was helping the department due to the presence of the roadrunner/standby idea, and this kept her people from being reassigned.
All things considered; the situation had improved quite a lot for Jasmine once she got her system working properly. She wasn’t sure how to feel about Kamal giving her a small toy roadrunner for her birthday, but she supposed it would be a good desk decoration when she got promoted to be the next department manager. A girl had to be ambitious, after all.
