Greetings from Boston, MA. Making a quick trip up the East Coast, then out to San Diego. Eight workshops this week on my favorite subject. Elliott Jaques and his research on Time Span.
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“How big was your company five years ago, and how big is it now?” I asked. “And what have been the growing pains getting here?”

“It’s people,” Jonas replied, “always people.” Jonas runs a small company with 80 people, up from 40 five years ago.

“How so? People is a pretty generic response.”

“Well, when we were small, it was a struggle just to get the work done. Now, we have plenty of horsepower, we have even documented our processes, but things are more complicated. Sometimes we hit a home run. Other times, we simply drop the ball. I think it boils down to communication problems. People don’t seem to talk to each other when they need to. Our supervisors seem to worry about their own little area and just assume the other departments will pick up the pieces. Well, they don’t!”

“How much is this costing you?” I probed.

“I can’t really put a number on it. The margin gets lost in rework, delays and idle time. You know, when we have people scheduled to work, but no work stacked in the queue. Or we have too much work scheduled for Thursday and Friday, so we end up with overtime on Saturday.”

“How have you tried to fix it?”

“I don’t know, I get all my supervisors together and they say they have it under control, but the next day, there is some big snafu.”

“Do you think, maybe, you have the wrong heads working on the problem?” -TF