by Serguey Shinder
I spent two days on our warehouse floor in 2022 chasing a stock discrepancy that turned out to be our software's fault. The discrepancy took an hour. The two days are what I think about.
On the wall by the pick faces there was a laminated sheet describing how to change a face over. Revision fourteen. A date, and the initials of the person who had last changed it, who was a picker rather than a manager. There was a whiteboard where the shift wrote up anything that had gone wrong, as it happened, and the supervisor walked it at two every afternoon and asked about the entries. Handover at shift change was four minutes long and followed a script. The team leader had been there nineteen years and could tell me why the pick sequence ran the way it did, including which part of it was a compromise with the building.
None of that is technology. All of it is a discipline that industry worked out between about 1960 and 1990, wrote down, and now teaches to people in their first week.
I came back to my own department and looked at us honestly. We prepared a release perhaps forty times a year and there was no written standard for it, so it went differently depending on who did it and how tired they were. Problems were discussed in a retrospective a fortnight after they happened, by which point the detail was gone, and the actions were owned by whoever was quietest. The same complaint about environment setup appeared in three consecutive quarters and nobody wrote anything down in between. We did have nine dashboards.
My honest expectation for the next decade is that the tooling advantage largely evens out. The tools arrive faster than any of us can absorb them and they are converging on each other, and whatever any of us has that is special this year is a purchase order away from being ordinary. What does not even out is whether a team knows how it does its own recurring work, notices its own problems on the day, and lets the person doing the job change the method.
We wrote a one page standard for release preparation, with a revision number, a date and the initials of whoever last edited it, now at revision nine and last edited by our newest engineer. There is a board of the week's interruptions and I walk it on a Thursday. Release preparation went from about fifty minutes to fifteen, and the environment complaint has not come back.
The most useful thing I have read in two years was not written about software. When I want to improve how we work now, I go looking for a trade that has been solving our shape of problem for longer than our industry has existed, and there is almost always one.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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