The correct way to stack the dishwasher

It’s the end of the meal. What happens next? Does each person put their plate in the dishwasher as they see fit? And then does the next person move everything so they can fit pots and pans in? Or maybe you have the King (or Queen) of the Dishwasher who does all the stacking and won’t let anyone else near. Do you have a Cutlery Arrangement Board to ensure nothing goes awry between the knives and forks? Maybe you use the Implement Tessellation Instruction Library to ensure the maximum efficiency of the wash cycle. But maybe people have their own ideas of what to do. Are you left wondering what you can do to get to some form of order?

Richard Horton has spent a decade and more in the service management kitchen. Here are some musings on what the dishwasher might have to say about ITSM. When the rinse cycle finishes will everything be clean? And will everyone still be on speaking terms when it comes to the next load?

Why look at dishwashers?

Dishwashers are indispensable to many of us. We take it for granted that they are there, our willing servants, ready to make life easier. At the end of the meal, in go the dishes, and we leave it to do its stuff. Service management can be a bit like that, taken for granted and indispensable. But it wasn’t this that made me think of the dishwasher analogy.

I have been struck by the strength of opinion that people have about how to stack a dishwasher. Should you rinse first? What stacks best where? What should be washed by hand? What do you do with sharp knives? Maybe you will get a sharp correction. Or maybe someone will just move it back after you have moved away.

The thing is, despite academic study into these questions, there aren’t rules for these things. And, as in frameworks like ITIL, “it depends” is more important than you might think at first. It is unlikely that what you do will break the dishwasher. Maybe this makes people all the more willing to have their own opinion and stick to it.

Who knows best?

I have found that people in other areas can have a strong view on what service management is responsible for. This doesn’t necessarily correlate with my view or indeed with the view of people in other areas. If you are not careful, then rather than having one process applied for everyone you can have a customised process for each area. And people are only too willing to find what they see as valid exceptions to whatever rules are in place.

Of course, we know that our role is to enable change, not to control it, and we’ve spent years working on that balance. To provide appropriate assurance we often need people to do a little more than they want to. Our perspective is likely to be a broader one, seeing potential impacts across areas. But how are we perceived? People who get in the way or people who help?

There is a certain irony here that IT service managers find it so difficult to describe what they do. It starts with the basics. We find it hard to give a clear and meaningful definition of what a service is in the first place. I’ve blogged about that before for itSMF. If we find it so hard, we shouldn’t be surprised when our work colleagues struggle to understand what we do and what they can expect from us. So maybe it’s not such a surprise when we find ourselves viewed in different ways by different people.

Where all this started for me was a story told by someone I know well. He observed that his father-in-law had been very supportive of him as a son-in-law, and had not tried to change him. There was however one point where the son-in-law was corrected: when he was stacking the dishwasher incorrectly. I doubt whether what was being done was so fundamentally wrong to merit a once in a decade correction. But we do have particular views about how things should be done. Let’s explore this a little more.

So how do we use a dishwasher?

To start with, what sort of dishwashing scenario are we talking about? This has a big impact on what is appropriate. In a mass catering context, industrial efficiency is the driver. The supply of large numbers of identically shaped dirty plates at the same time supports this. I’m more interested in the home scenario, which is more analogous to a smaller business.

Take my house. I thrive on having people round for meals. On Christmas Day there were 10 of us sat round the dining table. This despite the fact that we had only moved into the house 10 days earlier. In the days when I had no dishwasher there were times when it felt like I lived at the sink (as I didn’t make my guests wash up). Now, when entertaining, we try to run the dishwasher at the start of the meal. This will process pots and pans used for preparation, and anything else lying around. Then, when it finishes, we add the plates. For a big meal there will be another run the following morning, for things like large pans and dishes.

Meanwhile posh wine glasses and handmade dishes are done by hand. The net result, the kitchen is (reasonably) tidy and we’ve not spent all night washing up. The key points here are that we think about when we run the dishwasher and we use it differently at different times. We only have one dishwasher, but what is dirty varies.

All this is very similar to a service management world. We often can’t control what comes at us. But we will have constraints to work within about what we can process. We will need to organise ourselves to process work in an efficient and effective manner.

So, going back to the difficulty people have working out what we do, maybe that’s something we should work on. In our dishwashing context, maybe a visitor wants to help stack the dishwasher. If so you would make sure they know what is your precious dish that must be done by hand and if you have any particular foibles about how things are stacked.

In a service management context what would help people engage with us? Where do we want people to follow standard routes? What makes an exception that justifies custom treatment? I have found that when you help them navigate a specific challenge people start to see you as an enabling rather than a constraining force. Doing the small things well can open up larger opportunities.

As an example, we have a number of volunteer groups in my organisation. These encompass such topics as how we get more from our core tools through to wellbeing and inclusion. I’ve found that getting involved in these reveals what people actually do and informs what will help them do things in the way we are after. Basically making it easier to do things right than wrong. Easier said than done, but people appreciate it when it happens.

Washing by hand and other variants

A challenge here for us as IT service managers links back to the dishwasher scenario. If we don’t have a cooking device we can’t cook the food, and if we don’t have crockery then we struggle to serve and eat our food. But if we don’t have a dishwasher there is an alternative of washing by hand. Not always a helpful alternative but it can blur the lines between what is a good idea and what is possible. Can we bypass all the process checks and just do it anyway? Yes. Will there be consequences? Quite probably. Does it matter? Depends on the scenario.

On an epi-pen the instructions basically say that there could be serious side effects if you inject yourself. They go on to say that the alternative could be death so just do it anyway if you need it. However examples like the epi-pen are exceptions. And, almost by definition, the exception should not be the norm. So, we want people to understand that putting the dishes through the dishwasher in an orderly way helps them as well as us.

What about rinsing? The academic theory is that you shouldn’t. Scraping yes, rinsing no. But there’s another factor here. If you leave the dishwasher to do the rinsing then you need to clean the filter more. Now, I know that I’m rather better at loading and unloading a dishwasher than cleaning the filter. So I know it makes good sense to make sure that the worst is off those plates and pans before they go in, even if, theoretically, it isn’t the most efficient approach. Maybe one could compare rinsing to assurance checks. How many do we do, and what purpose do they serve? We don’t want to be ticking the box for the sake of ticking the box. But let’s spare a thought for the poor person who fields the change that has caused implementation problems. Whether or not the customer is impacted directly we’ve made life more challenging for our staff. 

Here’s another service management analogy. Ever come across people wanting to chop bits off the process to get an earlier implementation? The way a dishwasher works the final phase is its residual heat drying everything. So, yes, you can open the dishwasher before the end of the cycle, but don’t expect the same result. Short-cuts can be taken to accelerate delivery, but the quality may suffer. When people say they want to be “pragmatic” I keep an eye open for what they think it’s OK to lose. Maybe it’s all OK. But maybe they are cheerfully sacrificing something important. The short term gains of delivering something may be outweighed by the reputational impact of getting it wrong, for example.

You and me

Continuing with the people theme, a dishwasher is a machine. But it’s a machine to serve people. If the way we use it causes friction in the kitchen that isn’t a good result. Our IT service management is about providing business value, absolutely. But it’s about working with people. We want those people to feel their lives have been enhanced by coming into contact with the ITSM dishwasher.

OK, let’s run through an evening meal scenario. What scenes could highlight some of the service management old chestnuts.

To come at it from a slightly different angle here is life with a dishwasher imagined in an ITSM world.

• Before the meal (aka Start where you are): The projects versus service management divide (over the fence). Getting early enough visibility of what is being done to put ideas into practice remains an enduring challenge.
• Before serving (aka Think holistically): What resources do we need? What will happen after implementation (is everything for the meal lined up? Can you get an initial dishwasher load going?) Establishing and working with acceptance criteria
• Getting the food to the table (Collaborate and promote visibility): It would be nice if the food people eat is food they can eat. If there’s an allergy friendly dish it needs to go to the right person. Communications breaking down is another old chestnut. Does everyone who needs to know realise the change is being released?
• During the meal: Operational services – no news is good news. At the table, the dishwasher is out of sight and mind: allowing focus on what is important. Responding to customer needs. Keep it simple and practical. What do people need to know to give them confidence that everything is under control? Demonstrating competence. When we have plans do we fulfil them?
• Between courses: A lot of work may be done by suppliers and contracts come to an end. We want smooth handover to whatever comes next, whether it is more of the same or a shift to something new. Here we want to be good customers and ask for what we actually want (easier said than done). Focus on value. Tendering – being on receiving end and issuing them.
• Dessert: How do we ensure that the last course is right sized? Maybe portion size will need to be adapted based on how full people are. Progress iteratively with feedback. Pilots can prove what you can do (including resourcing) and allow setting up something that aligns with your needs.
• After the meal. Washing by hand (manual tasks) has its place, but the dishwasher comes into its own. Optimise and automate.  Dealing with everyone else’s view of your role. Simplifying approvals.
• And finally… thanking the host. The dishwasher is not mentioned but has been an important part of a successful evening, and the host knows it. Even if we are not praised to the rafters, we can and should celebrate success internally, and find ways to communicate what value we have added. But let’s keep a sense of proportion. We’re a dishwasher, not the meal. Maybe I should be viewing the kitchen as the analogy rather than a dishwasher. Then things become more integrated and it’s harder to mould ITSM in your image. But that’s one for another day.

When the dishwasher has finished

So, going back to my dishwasher theme…

• You can stack how you like but you need to work within the constraints of the machine
• Pots and pans will have different requirements to plates or glasses. One approach does not fit all scenarios even if you are using the same framework
• There is probably a right way of stacking for what you have – but do you know what you will be washing up? Don’t try to make things too perfect
• Sometimes processing a load is more important than correct stacking. Keep the pressing priorities in mind
• The end result matters – will it be clean
• Understand valid exception cases
• Everyone knows best… can you work with different views?

A final thought. A dishwasher is built to cope with a variety of uses, but has a fixed capacity. It works because it is resilient and foolproof, not because you stacked it correctly. May your service management setup be equally effective!

Looking for more blogs by Richard Horton? Try How we use AI in ITSM