Red means stop

A new operations person was hired to solve our production problems. To address my concerns about transparency into those problems, the “solution” implemented was installing a visual indicator — a traffic light. Red means production is halted. Green means production is going as expected. Yellow… we haven’t defined yet. The manager in question is a circuits geek, and spent the better part of a day rigging up something that would plug into our corporate network.

Just after noon, all of our machines became unusable. Our overworked IT manager was nearly pulling his hair out trying to diagnose the problem — the servers were up, but not talking to the network. Nothing was talking to the network. He went around door-to-door, asking if anyone “plugged something new in recently.”

When the network returned from its 90 minute lunch break, the traffic light was gone and unplugged.

Red means the company stops.