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Isn't the example in your last paragraph more about specialization than cutting out slack? It seems to me like they misunderstood the value stream. The special

• Jtsummers 5y ago
  It's both, their specialization provided slack (both to themselves and the engineers). And yeah, the value stream was grossly misunderstood, and the work was undervalued. Because of their specialization they were fast with broken systems (they used the same crappy web apps as us, but they understood them). Because they were not engineers and they got the work done fast, there was no perceived value in their role (classism and other biases at play here), it was thought (bad assumption) that the engineers could do it just as well themselves. And since the engineers had more than enough slack anyways, they could lose 15-30 minutes before and after a trip to dealing with the paperwork. And if that assumption had been correct, maybe it would have been the right call. But the assumption was incorrect, and it was a very stupid call. We didn't charge the customers for that overhead, so any time the engineer spent on it (hours, sometimes days) was revenue lost. The dedicated team cost much less than the lost revenue so it was overall a net loss.