After years of sharing this story with coworkers, clients, and friends we have decided to put this story to paper. Like a B rated movie relegated to an obscure corner of Netflix, this blog post chronicles a true story of one couple’s journey to make good on a challenging New Year’s resolution. Along the way they discovered certain truths that would make a profound impact on their marriage and how software is delivered. We hope this is both entertaining and insightful. Enjoy!
January 1, 2013
My wife and I were traveling home from visiting family over Christmas and New Years and we started the usual post holiday conversation. It started with ranting about eating too much of my mother-in-law’s Louisiana cooking and an action plan to work it off. Inevitably our retrospective conversation inspired other home improvement topics like organizing clutter and managing the continuous flow of laundry demand.
In our house the laundry saga was always in a constant state of disarray. For years my wife and I tried countless experiments to keep up with our laundry demand. We tried the single-wringable neck approach (Product Owner), a schedule, and a kanban board with WIP limits. None have worked long term!
The Baseline
Before we continue the story, let’s baseline what the laundry situation was like in my house before we had this conversation.
We had three baskets for lights, darks, and towels. Those laundry baskets sat side by side and would pile up until there was a miniature Mt. Everest emerging in our bedroom. That was usually about the time we would break down and do a big bang release…I mean have an epic laundry weekend. We would literally do 5-10 loads of laundry over the course of a weekend. We both dreaded laundry weekends. 🙁
The weekend started by dumping all three baskets of clothes onto our bed, which had gotten mixed up during the Mt Everest expedition. We would then spend time sorting the clothes so that they could be washed. After each load came out of the washer/dryer cycle, we then folded them and put them away.
However, we always ran into a sock defect problem. Our socks were scattered throughout each load and finding matching socks was a nightmare. We would end up laying 20-30 unmatched socks across the back of our couch and then hope we could find the match as each new load was finished. Inevitably some socks never found their mate and were thrown into a sock defect backlog (aka a plastic bin).
As young aspiring laundry managers, we thought we could fix this problem by throwing more resources at it and getting deeper laundry baskets to manage our robust laundry requirements. And that’s just what we did. We went to the store and bought a set of deeper laundry baskets.
The results? Bigger batches of laundry, more sock defects, and less motivation to do laundry. All we did was bury the problem and make it worse. We were on the verge going to Laundry Anonymous!
Back to the story…
As my wife and I were in the car discussing our past failures and current laundry dilemma, I started to think about how Lean principles might help expose some solutions. So I got my geek on and started consulting with my wife (always a smart choice ;-). As I started peppering her with situational questions a severe pain point emerged! Unbeknownst to me (probably why I’m not allowed to do laundry anymore ;-), we have six different types of work as it relates to our laundry. Before washing, the laundry must be sorted into six different types of work:
- Light delicates
- Dark delicates
- White regular
- Dark regular
- Light colored towels
- Dark colored towels
My wife mentioned that she spends a lot of time sorting. Of course, like any good root cause analyzer, I asked WHY. And she said…wait for it Lean enthusiasts…because she has to sort through the whole batch at one time! Boy was I relieved (and deep down excited). I can handle large batch sizes. 🙂
Now we had to do something about it. We realized there was a direct correlation with the batch size and our laundry throughput, which ultimately impacted our laundry happiness. We knew the root cause was our batch size.
In the next blog post, we will share what we did to improve our laundry happiness and what we discovered as it relates to delivering software.