More Lean Cooking

In the series of daily life inspired posts, I return to one of my favorite subjects: cookery. This time I was making some vegetable casserole. I needed to peel and shred some carrots and I fell into the age old trap: big batch size.

As you can see, I had in advance decided to use more than six carrots. While I was peeling them, I was aware that I should have peeled end shredded them one by one, in a one piece flow. But against my own good, I peeled and cut the heads off from six in a row. I was convincing myself that it was more efficient (although I was creating extra inventory).

After peeling the six carrots I finally started to shred them. Only to find out that by cutting the head off I had made the work more cumbersome. And now the fault was multiplied six times. If I'd done a proof of concept (gotten one carrot through the whole pipeline), I would have only had one faulty carrot. Fail fast!

I faced another problem later. I would have been well off with only three or four carrots. But since I had already peeled six, there was no turning back. Now my costs were bigger than they needed to be, I could have saved some veggies for the next time.

The same phenomenon is easily found in software development if you use kanban board without proper WIP (work in progress/process) limits. It's easy to pile up too much work that is waiting for testing or merging to the main branch. The flow is far from optimal, but perceiving the problem is far more difficult due to the fact that the material is less tangible, in most cases information.

The final result was quite edible despite the faulty process. :)