Basketball at L

We had two days of holidays and bball took up 2 hours of each. To say that it took only two hours is a kind of fiction. It takes a lot more. The concept of 'setup' time that has come to be so much a part of our lives is quite interesting. Any ops course such as MSD (Manufacturing Systems Design) will tell you that reducing setup time will have a direct effect on your inventory turnover, your profits, working cap requirements, and stuff like that. And I guess its so true everywhere, not just manufacturing. We had 10 guys to call for bball, from neigbouring hostels. But somehow, try as we might, getting them together on one court quickly is quite a task in itself.


(The pic is from here).

This presents more than an ops problem because of its variability. When you take a situation in a known environment under known constraints such as a factory, it is easy to optimise. The problem is that in this case, there are very few knowns... we don't even know if people are 'ready' to play. The concept of being ready is another ball game. Here i must bring in Warcraft, for it has so neccessarily brought in its own operational problems. Last year, before we discovered yawle we had to arrange for 6 - 8 computers from our hostel, then call the people from other hostels to our own and then start the game. Over time we optimised these proceedures so it took us around 15 - 20 mins to start a game. Is this what we're trying to achieve at work ? Sounds like some practical use for WC after all :D After yawle, it's not a big deal anymore. But we still reduced the time. We use gtalk and mobiles to setup instant games.
So how is all this related to bbal. I guess the channels we use to setup something sort of move on to other areas as well. So when there was a bball game on, we simply used the same channel to inform people. I must say, it would have been frustrating to go to everyone's room and call them. But I wonder sometimes, if we would develop the same channels as the need arose, or if this experience actually improves on it.
The game went well. We didn't win, but it was good anyway. Reminded me that there are ample things to do here at L, just that we gotta optimise our time to get down to doing it. We did a night out that night after a long game :) That could have been avoided for sure.

Karthik.

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