Posts Tagged ‘kanban’

Grape Crepe Plates & Social Media as Kanban system for optimizing organizational flows of information needs

Monday, May 18th, 2009

Tonight I made crepes for the kids.  Mom and away and so I figure this is a good time for me to experiment with some new dishes.  In the picture you can see two plates we used, a little dirty, that have labels that my one son printed out and attached to the top of the plates. img_07721 While I was busy making the crepes and giving them to the kids as fast as I could make them, they were eating them almost as fast.  My son would give me back the plate as they finished the crepes.  I would know exactly which kind they wanted more of. One plate was labled WUNBGCHESE and the other plate was labeled GRAPE. I made big cheese crepes and grape jelly crepes.  Beside the obvious work on spelling for ONE, BIG, and CHEESE,  I thought this is really ingenious.  It reminded me of the Just-in-time Kanban system. Wikipedia here and shorter/better article here.

Now, I have been doing a lot of thinking about social media and twitter and whether it is a push or pull type of system.  The crepe plates and kanban are both pull systems.  Inside of large organizations (like IBM) or an extended enterprises (like an Automotive Supply Chain) there might be a nice way to implement a “plate” that lets people know there is a needed update to certain kinds of information. Maybe social media mechanisms might be able to satisfy the 4 rules of implementing a pull system in terms of a Kanban system.

The 4 Rules are:

Rule 1 – Kanban works from upstream to downstream in the production process
My thought – So an report/answer would only be created when someone needs that information.  Reports that aren’t needed aren’t produced.

Rule 2 – The upstream processes only produce what has been withdrawn.
My thought – If information/reports are broken into appropriate levels of granularity – this might allow someone to only produce a update on those sections which were used/read/consumed.

Rule 3 – Only products that are 100 percent defect-free continue on through the production line.
My thought – Only reports/information that are “true” could go through. Quality and authenticity are the most important value.

Rule 4 – The number of kanban should be decreased over time.
My thought – The number of reports/information that gets worked on should be minimized over time because if something isn’t being used, it won’t get updated – reducing the breath of information following through organization but speeding up the smaller and more focused used kinds of information.

I guess I might call this “Social Media used as an Kanban system for optimizing organization flows of information needs.”