If we look at it from the systemic perspective, the goal is to have enough milk at the office just in time.
Balancing the tasks between different actors within the system is a different concern.
If 30 seconds of my time saves someone else 10 minutes, it may be a good tradeoff, even if my time costs a few times more.
On one of the most effective teams I worked on, there was a tech lead who would throw himself into a role based on the team's needs based on insight from a morning daily. Most of the time, he played his strongest suit (back-end). However, there were days when he was helping with the most menial front-end tasks (he wasn't super-effective at that) or testing (same).
Was he efficient? If we look at him in isolation, then no. But because his work helped to remove bottlenecks and unblock the team, the whole team was more effective thanks to him.
What is interesting in some of the discussion threads here is how people look at the process effectiveness in a completely reverse way. Sometimes, they focus on their individual efficiency as if they were able to deliver value singlehandedly. Individual efficiency doesn't mean much.
A typical example would be a developer who's super efficient, but there's no one to do a code review (or test or whatever) just in time. By the time they get a list of issues to fix, they don't remember the context, they wrote so much more stuff relying on the things that they need to redo, etc.
Their efficiency would mainly be regarding coding in isolation. While the effectiveness would be measured in what the team could release/deliver to the clients.
As per Drucker's famous quote: "There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all."
Balancing the tasks between different actors within the system is a different concern.
If 30 seconds of my time saves someone else 10 minutes, it may be a good tradeoff, even if my time costs a few times more.
On one of the most effective teams I worked on, there was a tech lead who would throw himself into a role based on the team's needs based on insight from a morning daily. Most of the time, he played his strongest suit (back-end). However, there were days when he was helping with the most menial front-end tasks (he wasn't super-effective at that) or testing (same).
Was he efficient? If we look at him in isolation, then no. But because his work helped to remove bottlenecks and unblock the team, the whole team was more effective thanks to him.
What is interesting in some of the discussion threads here is how people look at the process effectiveness in a completely reverse way. Sometimes, they focus on their individual efficiency as if they were able to deliver value singlehandedly. Individual efficiency doesn't mean much.
A typical example would be a developer who's super efficient, but there's no one to do a code review (or test or whatever) just in time. By the time they get a list of issues to fix, they don't remember the context, they wrote so much more stuff relying on the things that they need to redo, etc.
Their efficiency would mainly be regarding coding in isolation. While the effectiveness would be measured in what the team could release/deliver to the clients.
As per Drucker's famous quote: "There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all."