“I look forward to any suggestions you have to offer, Sarah.”

Of course Phoenix is causing all the problems. You get what you design for. Chester, your peer in Development, is spending all his cycles on features, instead of stability, security, scalability, manageability, operability, continuity, and all those other beautiful ’itties.

The meeting winds down and we all leave smiling. That’s a first for my team.

By 2 p.m. Saturday, it’s pretty clear that the bottom is a lot further down than I thought possible.

Total Productive Maintenance, which has been embraced by the Lean Community. tpm insists that we do whatever it takes to assure machine availability by elevating maintenance.

right. The one consistent theme in the interviews was that everyone struggles to get their project work done. Even when they do have time,

Steve knew exactly how to get you to say yes. He just made it sound like it was your duty to save his job and the company.”

Situations like this only reinforce my deep suspicion of developers: They’re often carelessly breaking things and then disappearing, leaving Operations to clean up the mess.

If any operation in the flow of work takes longer than the takt time, you will not be able to keep up with customer demand.”