Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.

Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.

This is a great Mantra and every-day I am more and more convinced that this is how we should start responding to some "personalities".

This week, and it is only Wednesday I wanted to tell it to a couple of people, one at work and one to one of my acquainted. Planning ahead and be prepared to all eventualities, is something that MUST be done - we cannot always rely on rescuers at every last minutes. 

I think this relates very much to another saying " Failing to Plan IS Planning to Fail".

Make-Ready Plan is a Lean Construction tool that helps you look ahead and make sure that what you are planning is actually going to happen. Identification of constrains, road-blocking items and bottleneck can be easily resolved if evaluated ahead of time and not during the crisis moment.

Let's pause and think ... before we do anything.

MBTA ... not too Lean today!

Something very interesting has happened to me yesterday, on my way home.
I was on the MBTA train and, at some point, the train stops and the conductor announced: "As of yesterday the switch does not work. I apologize for the delay but I have to stop the train, go down and make a manual switch." 
I was appalled! 
My first thought .... "this is NOT Lean at all". Now, let's try to see what type of "waste" are we talking about:
     Just to make a quick note, on my line there is a traffic of 32 trains per day

1. Excessive Motion: The conductor, whose job is to "conduct" the train has to walk from the train to the switch and back ... and this has to be done by each conductor (32) for each train (32) going through the line for a period of 24 hours (or until the problem is fixed)
2. Inappropriate Processing: or  “using a sledgehammer to crack a nut” is what has been happening for at least 24 hour by using human labor to do something that should be done automatically by a simple machine or computer.
3. Defects: this, I guess, in an obvious observation as the entire problem has been caused by a simple defect which should have been addressed immediately!
4. Underutilization of Employees: this is another obvious waste as it relates to the second highlighted here. The talent of the conductor is NOT to manually switch the control!
5. and finally ... WAITING!: let's just list all the waiting that has been produced for EACH TRAIN in a laps time of 24 hours. Who is waiting? The other conductors, the engineer, the commuters, those who are waiting for the commuters to arrive at work for a meeting, those who are waiting at the train station for the commuters to be picked-up, those who are waiting for the commuters to arrive at home on time for dinner and we can go on and on!

I am not sure the MBTA understands the implications of a simple broken switch! and again not Lean at all.