Principle 6 - Command & Control
More Practices
Leverage Collective Wisdom
Providing everyone in your ServiceNow value stream with shared, real-time information increases your team's decision-making accuracy and effectiveness. In his book, The Wisdom of Crowds, author James Surowiecki found that "[diverse] groups consistently make better decisions and come up with better answers than most of their members, and surprisingly often the group outperforms even its best member."
Andon Cord
The beauty of command and control is that anyone at any time can pull the "andon cord." Andon is a Japanese word denoting lighting equipment such as a lamp. Andon was later adopted as part of the Toyota Production System in which it signaled (i.e., a blinking light) that a defect had been found at a specific workstation. The Andon also represented that the entire production system had been halted and awaiting remediation.
It may seem like a speed-killer to stop a system when a defect or problem is found. However, TPS found that by stopping the manufacturing system at the time of a problem, you had an immediate opportunity for improvement as opposed to letting the defect move further down the line. The output metrics of TPS are legendary and factual and have been written about in numerous books and academic papers. It is a concept recommended by xtype.
Being Present
Resolving issues in the present rather than the future allows you to remediate issues with the highest chance of being solved because they are top of mind. To not do so is to pass forward a form of technical debt that comes with compounding interest in the form of instance drift, longer planning meetings, increased privileges (to troubleshoot), and more.
Additionally, the learnings from immediate troubleshooting will improve your process and platform engineering setup with every release. In other words, your practice and process get better and more efficient with every release. Without the practice and recommendation of the "Andon Cord," the opposite will happen.