Drop a Spoon into a Cup

First things first. Rube Goldberg was a genius, in my humble opinion. Check out his background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine.

FORGIVE ME FOR I WILL DIGRESS

As you know if you have read my articles, sometimes I digress. Is this an article to (and of course the answer is YES to all three... it started out as a business article but morphed into a tribute to my son!):

• Highlight the need to be lean in your business processes?
• Bring out a bit of sadness that my boy is graduating high school soon? That he just swam in his last swim meet? That he is closer to 18 than 17? WHERE DID THE TIME GO??? (Into the past, of course!)
• Illustrate the point that I have found a place for nostalgia in my life?

LET'S GET BACK TO RUBE

Rube sums up what I see when I evaluate Root Cause Analysis documents (RCAs), across a variety of businesses and ecosystems. They are overly complicated. Dozens of fields. Granted, to conduct a good blameless postmortem it is critical to:

• identify the problem crisply and concisely
• use scientific methods to determine causality
• implement counter-measures intended to prevent recurrence

That said, the typical IT RCA is 6-10 pages long, the analysis and the root-cause determination (whether it is one cause or more than one), along with the action planning, are buried and hard to follow. We as engineers, of course, want to often tell the long story. How many times have you heard "long story short" to only be wooed into a looooooong story? Interestingly engineers also have less and less patience these days to review RCAs but seem to struggle to write a crisp executive summary.

LET'S GET BACK TO THE BOY

I am thrilled that my son recently got to do an assignment involving Rube Goldberg concepts. Also - even though his senior year has been mostly disappointing due to Covid impacts, there have been a few bright spots. Do not tell him this but I have become his default lab partner! I'm admittedly the lab partner that "got the grade" but didn't do much. I have been more of a cheerleader.

So, how can one transform a simple operation into a 17-second ordeal, which includes a walk down memory lane? Ironically, it is very easy to make the simplest task very complicated, take a look:

The lead engineer on this project is shown below. Beacon High Class of 2021!

BACK TO THE POINT

So - when you look at your business processes, you should manically decide whether you need all of the overhead. Do you need that duct tape? Do you need that left turn instead of going straight? Do you need bumpers at the end to compensate for weak processes? Do you get distracted and forget what you were trying to do? Does your 5-step process have 50 fields to fill out?

Rube Goldberg "machines" are everywhere, particularly in business processes. As my brother Lou would say, "the only bad thing about my great advice is that people don't always take it." So - your assignments are to:

• Re-write your business process from a minimalist point of view. Shred the old one and start anew.
• Check out ServiceNow work flows. Very impressive. Most times "buy" versus make is the right decision in the realm of work flows.
• Embrace the moment. Turn that lemon into lemonade. Covid quarantines have sucked in many ways, but there is ALWAYS a silver lining.

I hope you enjoyed my short trot down memory lane! The opinions and views herein are solely my own. PS - don't tell my son (just yet) about this tribute!