In the mid-1990s I was working in a factory which had not experienced a major equipment installation in the past ten years. Much of the experience in managing that kind of effort had moved on or retired.
The first big window was Thanksgiving weekend when we had four days, twelve shifts to accomplish the first work package.
It was a fiasco!
Among the major lessons were that hand-offs cause friction. Twelve shifts involved twelve hand-offs and it was a mess.
Another major lesson was that too many cooks spoil the broth. We had programmers walking in to a work cell, reviewing the programming done on the previous two shifts...and delete it all. Sixteen hours of progress flushed into the ether.
Subsequent installations involved management (which included me) working thirteen hour shifts to reduce the hand-offs from three/day down to two/day. The failure mode that reared its ugly head is that my opposite didn't come in an hour early ("I am not a morning person") so he would get into meetings and threw me under the bus with "I don't KNOW what those people on third shift are doing!!!!" with disgust in his voice.
Kitchens
I want to use kitchens as a test-sled of potential problems and possible work-arounds.
Let's say WW3 goes hot and the cities in the US catch fire. Let's say that the three young families you invited show up on your doorstep.
Four families cooking three meals a day (or more) will cause a huge amount of stress and it is likely that issues that originate in the kitchen will set the tone of how you handle problems.
One might be tempted to have each family responsible for one meal and to rotate but then you have the maximum number of hand-offs. I can just hear the next cook screaming about a kettle or pot not being scrubbed to her satisfaction by the previous user.
The proposed work-around is to have each family cook for a WEEK.
Additionally, the family that is cooking must wash every kettle, pan, dish and piece of silverware after every meal.
"Why?" you ask. Mainly because there will be a strong temptation for the main cook to get "sick" the evening of the hand-off and leave a mess for the next cook. Human nature is what it is. Like the Good Book says, "...lead us not into temptation..."
Oh, and it will be up to your or the Love of Your Life to enforce the clean-up rule.
Now if they want to negotiate with another family...no worries, as long as everything is clean, dry and stowed.
If the family does it a second time then HIRE one of the other families to do the clean-up and then require the slacker-family to pay for the work out of their stores. I bet hubby and kids will pick up the dragging end of the log when they see it costs them a couple of jars of strawberry jam or whatever you decide the toll will be.
That aligns nicely with the packaging of work elements into discrete, identifiable chunks that encourage "ownership". Ownership is a big thing in the Herzberg Two-Element Motivation Theory. Metrics might be "Waste", "Food-poisoning avoidance", "Maximizing flavor while going lightly an expensive foods" and so on.
There are other, similar groups of work-elements
Stove-wood: Cutting to length, splitting to size and filling the small kindling, large kindling and stove-wood. The same method of owning it for a week and handing off the "wood yard" and "wood boxes" full and with the tools in good repair are the metrics. It would not be out-of-line to cut some holes in a sheet of plywood to define the size of small kindling, medium kindling and stove-wood because one of the short-cuts is to not reduce the wood to the size required.
By making it a once-a-week hand-off there are fewer opportunities for squabbles to break out. The BEST manager is the one who configures the work so he has few conflicts to manage.
Water in the cistern
Traps and varmint control
Tool patrol and fence checks
Making sure laundry is off the line at night-fall
I am sure I missed a bunch of items but hopefully you can fill in the gaps in comments.
Incidentally, I linked the 2000 Calorie essays together for ease-of-reading.
First article HERE
I will entertain requests for future essays if you want to suggest them.
I told those who might show up here that this is NOT a democracy. I want suggestions but I Decide. If you can't agree you are gone. ---ken
ReplyDeleteERJ, shift transfer in my line of work can be a real issue, especially when there are active microbiological processes ongoing. One thing that has worked well in past lives is a standardized format for transferring information.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I like your idea of a week shift at a time. Make a great deal of sense.
Having the kitchen and prep area returned to zero after every meal is important too, along with enforcing a standard location for everything. With both in play anyone can walk in and take over for a meal without any cleanup penalty or learning curve after the first meal.
ReplyDeletethese essays are so good !
ReplyDeleteCash making job for evey american to earn and work online. earns more than doller15k every month with this home based job.bvg i made doller18521 from this job in my spare time afte my college
ReplyDeleteOpen The Link———–>>> ππ°π°.π°π¨π«π€π¬πππ«ππ.ππ¨π¦
A few things you have to consider about cooking in your story. First is what kind of kitchen facilities will be available? If things are bad enough that people are leaving their homes looking for a place to survive there may not be electricity so electric stoves, microwaves, electric crock pots and air fryers will not available. You can’t run them on solar because few home systems put out that kind of power, I follow a guy who lives in the Arizona desert who has to wait for a sunny day to bake bread because his gas oven has an electric igniter that can’t be bypassed. If you have propane can you depend on a supply. I have a wood kitchen range which we use in all the cold months but the kitchen gets too hot for major cooking in summer so we switch to the propane stove and the barbecue in summer. Another potential problem is that many younger people never had home ec and many are used to take out and preprepared food from the freezer and ramen. If your refugees are from an urban area this may a bigger problem and if they were country people they probably would stay home. I have camped enough since I was eleven that I could make a three course meal on a camp fire if I ran out or propane in the summer! But all said and done you may have to partner experienced cooks with apprentices until the newbies learn. Pretty much all areas need the experienced people to teach the inexperienced until the learn not just fill a position in a schedule. By the way, several people I worked with in the 90s and early 20s had wives or girlfriends who couldn’t cook so if they wanted home cooked they had to go home and cook!
ReplyDeleteI seem to remember in old days, the wood stove was moved out onto the porch for cooking. I don't remember WHERE I read that, only that it is a memory.
DeleteYeah, we've ALL been thrown under the bus a time or two...
ReplyDeleteThen fuddy duddy sneaks in at 2am and makes peanut and jam sandwich. I see problems. Woody
ReplyDelete2000 calories - Perimeter Security 24x7.
ReplyDeletePlease.
My second college experience was at His Hill in Comfort Texas. To keep costs low, the students worked at the school.
ReplyDeleteWe had weekly chores assigned. There was staff that was in charge of each area. Cooks didn't clean. There were enough there to really divy up the work.
There was prep, cooking, cleanup, and serving. I remember one week of cleaning the walk in fridge and freezer with bleach water once a day.
We built fence, cleaned up the area, did housekeeping, livestock maintenance, vehicle maintenance. Others worked in the office on the phones, mail in and out, and errands to and from town. With over a 100 students, the chore list was pretty specific.
When we camped as a family, I got stiffed cooking, cleaning up after and breaking camp all on Sunday one too many times. Poor planning... Poor execution.
Not all women can cook. Let's not lump us in the kitchen for a week when no one is going to enjoy what's for dinner that night. Some have an affinity for baking and those cookies will sure taste good on your tree chopping sojourn but some are better for getting dinner on the table.
ReplyDeleteReading this I can see a place for most all ages. Smalls in the garden learning with mom, 8/9 year old with the dad's teaching them how to hunt, boys and girls, olders keeping an eye on kids, changing the diapers, shelling the pea's and snapping the beans, sewing on the buttons and mending the rips. Lots of ages to keep this household running. Grumbles, of course, nobody ever gets along every day. But if it escalates everyone sits down at a family meeting and hashes it out. If same person or family keep coming up in a year then family meeting regarding asking them to leave. Even if it will possibly mean death for them. Hard decisions but it has to be done or this family isn't going to last.