If you’re a frequent podcast listener, chances are you’ve heard of the This American Life podcast. It’s probably the most listened-to podcast available.
While it normally features all kind of content, from humorous stories to gripping drama, last weeks episode felt a bit different.
They ran a story about NUMMI, a car plant where Toyota and GM worked together to improve productivity.
Throughout the story, there are a lot of topics being mentioned that can all be brought back to our DevOps ways;
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Continuous improvement: if workers have an idea to improving their efficiency, they received a 100$ bonus.
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Microservices: originally, if something in the manufacturing process went wrong, the whole plant was shut down. At NUMMI, they worked on making smaller independent island that could continue to operate when other parts experienced problems.
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Reaching out: if something goes wrong, a manager would step in to offer help. In all other plants, managers yelled at their employees because their quotas wouldn’t be reached. This cultural change made a huge difference.
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Fixing instantly vs. repairing later: similar to microservices, the NUMMI plant would prefer to fix small problems straight away, momentarily shutting down their production area (microservice), instead of having to perform repairs on cars as they rolled of the line. It’s much harder to fix problems afterwards.
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Company-wide change: the NUMMI plant had a drastic change in working methods and ethics, but the rest of General Motors didn’t. It’s not enough to disrupt one part of an organisation, progress and improvement needs to happen everywhere.
If you’re using the Overcast podcast player (highly recommended), you can get the episode here: NUMMI 2015. Or you can grab it from the official website/itunes at ThisAmericanLife.org.