April 30, 1992
Dear Everyone:
When I'm not stuck in meetings-bloody-meetings, I'm
flowcharting.
This is something we learned in CQI (Continuous
Quality Improvement). It's part of Step 5 of the 9-Step Process for
improvement. Pop-quiz!
Who can remember what Step 5 is?
(Answer: Identify
steps in current work process. In
other words, "Go to the freezer; get the box.")
In a flowchart, you identify
every step needed to complete
a function and which steps are a process rather than a decision to be
made. In class, the example we
used was: How to Make a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich.
Well, right off the bat I knew I had a problem.
Mother never let us have
peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. She
said the peanut butter just cemented the jelly to your teeth and
promoted more cavities. Nevertheless,
others in the group claimed to have had experience with PB&J sandwiches
and we persevered.
Step 1
Assemble the following: Peanut Butter; Jelly; Bread (2 slices);
knife; plate.
Step 2
Open the jar of Peanut Butter.
Step 3
Dig some peanut butter out and smear it on one slice of bread.
Step 4
Open the jar of Jelly.
Step 5
Dig some jelly out and smear it on the other slice of bread.
Step6
Put the two slices of bread together and eat.
Having completed our little flowchart, we had a
volunteer, “Mahitabel” from Forms Analysis Service and Technology (FAST)
start making a sandwich.
Of course, she ran into problems.
Like step 2: Nowhere did it say
that you could put down the lid from the jar of peanut butter.
So there was “Mahitabel” with the
jar lid in one hand, trying to dig out some peanut butter and, wait a
minute! Just how much
is "some peanut butter"? And
exactly how do you put two slices of bread together?
You don't even want to know about the raging
controversy over whether or not to cut off the crusts.
You get the idea. When
you flow chart a process, you must
never assume parts of the
process are obvious to everyone, even if they are.
Now you take a
real process like changing
Owner Codes, of which I am the only member of the "team".
This process has a wide range of
variations, depending on this, that and the other, plus a number of
overnight updates to get through and communicating with people who don't
always communicate back to you and a single Owner Code can take months
to get completed. So how do you
flowchart the whole thing?
Easy. You
start out with about 16 packages of Post-Its© and a single sheet of
paper slightly smaller than Times Square.
Write every possible contingency on a Post-It© and stick it
where it will do the most good.
Of course, there is a way to get around this rather
cumbersome method. It's called
"shadow boxes". On the flow
chart, every time you come to one of those continuous loop situations
where you go around and around with something for any number of times,
you plug in a "shadow box". This
appears on the chart as a box with another box behind it.
This symbolizes a "sub process"
behind the actual process.
Then, on another page, you flowchart the "sub
process" and, if necessary, plug more "shadow boxes" into it with more
"sub processes" behind them. In
this way, instead of a flowchart roughly 3 times the size of a Sample
Ballot in a Presidential Election Year, your flowchart is 8 1/2 X11 and
only about as thick as your average municipal phone directory.
“Jeannie” and I went to the movies again last
weekend (big surprise) and saw
The Player, which
is about a "player", a studio executive, in the behind the scenes world
of Hollywood. The plot manages to
poke fun at a lot of Hollywood practices (and stereotypes) without ever
actually gouging anyone in particular. And
it features about three dozen cameos by everybody who could get into it.
It's the kind of film you'll
love, if you like spotting celebrities; and we’ll probably go back
before it disappears to try and catch the ones we missed the first time
around.
Update on last week's flood:
The hall carpet is very nearly
all dry now. But I haven't had
the courage to pull everything out of my supply closet to see if there's
any water damage in there. Maybe
this weekend.
Love, as always,
Pete
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