{"id":1691,"date":"2021-04-27T12:55:00","date_gmt":"2021-04-27T12:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/arielsimpson.com\/?p=1691"},"modified":"2023-03-03T17:33:12","modified_gmt":"2023-03-03T17:33:12","slug":"the-best-bike-frame-maker-in-the-land","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arielsimpson.com\/index.php\/2021\/04\/27\/the-best-bike-frame-maker-in-the-land\/","title":{"rendered":"The Best Bike Frame Maker in the Land"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>[By Ariel Simpson, originally published February 2021 at <a href=\"https:\/\/engagedagility.com\/engaged-agility-blog\/\">EngagedAgility.com<\/a>]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I vividly recall my first Agility coach preaching to me, \u201cDon\u2019t get five projects halfway done; get one project completely done.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cBut that\u2019s less than half the productivity!\u201d I sputtered.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cYeah. Except that five half-way done projects deliver zero value to my customer.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This concept made no sense to me, and I think I know why. It\u2019s because, as a child, I heard the history of Henry Ford building the Model-T, I practiced \u2018dividing and conquering\u2019 chores with my siblings, I watched the candy factory episode of I Love Lucy: I knew that the assembly line was the secret to productivity! I knew that I needed to get good at one piece of work, and let other people handle the rest.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Teaming is a powerful tool, but too often we use it as an excuse to over-specialize. Imagine you work for a company that makes bicycles. Your job is to make the bike frames and give it to the next worker who then attaches the front wheel. All day long you make bike frames. You know very little about the rest of the bike making process, but darn it\u2014you make the best bike frames in the world! You know everything there is to know about bike frames.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What you don\u2019t know is that at the end of each day, eight of your bike frames are still on the assembly line. Eight of your bike frames are in various states of completion because they didn\u2019t get to the end of the line.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And what\u2019s wrong with that? Surely it\u2019s not your problem. You did your job perfectly, and tomorrow there are eight fewer frames to be made!&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But what if you had stopped making bike frames thirty minutes before your shift ended? What if you had gone to the end of the assembly line to help install brakes? You wouldn\u2019t have been as fast as the full time brake installer, but you would have been helpful. Instead of eight unfinished bikes, three or four of them might have been finished. That\u2019s three or four bicycles more that we get to customers, three or four bicycles worth of profit in your pocket.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This concept is key to effective teaming. It\u2019s great to be good at your job, but it\u2019s not an excuse to ignore the overall process. At the end of the day, it doesn\u2019t matter whether you\u2019re the best bike frame maker in all the land. Your customer ordered 100 working bicycles as soon as possible! The amount of work done isn\u2019t the point. The value delivered to your customer is the point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[By Ariel Simpson, originally published February 2021 at EngagedAgility.com] I vividly recall my first Agility coach preaching to me, \u201cDon\u2019t get five projects halfway done; get one project completely done.\u201d \u201cBut that\u2019s less than half the productivity!\u201d I sputtered.&nbsp; \u201cYeah. Except that five half-way done projects deliver zero value to my customer.\u201d&nbsp; This concept made [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2007,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/arielsimpson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/robert-bye-tG36rvCeqng-unsplash-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arielsimpson.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arielsimpson.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arielsimpson.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arielsimpson.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arielsimpson.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1691"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/arielsimpson.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1691\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2060,"href":"https:\/\/arielsimpson.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1691\/revisions\/2060"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arielsimpson.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arielsimpson.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arielsimpson.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arielsimpson.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}