VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [34]
Sarah Schwick and several other higher-level F&D managers joined them there.
It took some doing, but with urging from Wayne and Amy, Viktor and his people did gradually lay out the essential stages of a typical F&D project progressing from the first meeting with a client through the ultimate release of final design and documentation, along with material samples and sometimes a prototype. In between were a dozen or so major and distinct steps that had to be accomplished – and Wayne Reese, on a legal pad next to his plate, patiently diagrammed the flow and the various branches of inputs, labeling each box in neat block letters. This was what Wayne called “the value stream.”
At the core of it was a series of steps mainly consisting of testing and analysis that the F&D people referred to as “the loop.”
“Or sometimes ‘the infinite loop,’” Sarah quipped. “At least that’s the way it feels.”
“Why?” asked Amy. “I’m curious. Why do you call it ‘the loop’?”
“Because it’s a cycle,” said Viktor. “A project may go through the loop multiple iterations – testing, retesting … analysis, reanalysis … query, requery, and so on. It cycles through until we have the results the client contracted us to achieve and – or – until we know everything we need to know.”
“So it’s not a straight progression,” said Wayne. “I’m just wondering what the reason is. Why does the flow have to be cyclical? Why a loop?”
“Why not a loop?” asked Viktor.
“I don’t know. It just seems that if you’re going through all these iterations, you’re not moving forward.”
“But we are moving forward! With each cycle of hypothesis, testing, and analysis, we are learning more than we did on the previous cycle!”
Amy could sense that Wayne and Viktor were about to butt heads. She put her hand on Wayne’s sleeve before he could respond.
“Viktor, I don’t at all think that Wayne is questioning the validity or the wisdom of your ‘loop.’ He’s simply trying to better understand your system.”
“Absolutely,” said Wayne. “It’s just … why this configuration, as opposed to something else?”
“All I can say,” said Viktor, “is that over the years – over the decades at this point – we have found that this is what works. You have to understand that we are not doing repetitive, mass production kinds of things here at F&D.”
“I do understand that,” Wayne asserted.
“Nothing here is cut and dried. It’s cutting edge, not cut and dried. It’s development. It’s working with the unknown.”
“Right, and I am not saying anything against that,” said Wayne, “but the word you yourself used when I asked about the work flow was ‘convoluted.’ To me, ‘convoluted’ suggests opportunities for improvement … for greater value, faster speed, higher quality, and lower cost.”
“Perhaps the word was ill-chosen,” Viktor conceded with a smile. “Perhaps a more accurate word would be ‘complex.’”
“Or flexible,” said Sarah, chiming in. “What is going to happen during the course of a given project can’t always be mapped out at the beginning. We go down one path … maybe we get what we started out to get, and maybe we don’t! So we have to start over, try a new direction, go down a different path.”
“Exactly,” Viktor agreed. “And, Wayne, I mean no disrespect whatsoever, but here you have plotted out a nice set of boxes on a sheet of paper with arrows and labels and so on, and this is supposed to represent what goes on here. But please let me tell you something.”
Viktor spread his fingers and placed his fingertips on Wayne’s sheet of paper.
“You call this a value stream. But this does not depict the value we deliver to our clients. The value we deliver is in the thinking, which can’t be mapped on a whiteboard or a piece of paper, because it is multidimensional! Within these walls, there is scientific and technical creativity at work! It’s not a matter of ‘move data-set one from station A to station B, process three iterations, and spit it out.’ We are searching for solutions to very difficult and challenging problems. That is why they pay us the hundreds of thousands