We very often tell a managerial joke, which is not really a joke, because it is from real life. About a coffee machine.

This joke is very familiar to anyone who has dealt with IT companies, especially those involved in programming. Programmers drink coffee in unimaginable quantities. But if the coffee machine breaks down… You would think it’s not a big deal, right?

A broken coffee machine

One company had a coffee machine. Everybody drank coffee, everybody was happy, everybody was content with everything. But once the coffee machine broke down. Well, it broke, so what?

  • The coffee machine doesn’t work — you can’t make coffee
  • No coffee — nobody drinks coffee
  • Nobody drinks coffee — means everybody’s sleepy
  • Everybody’s sleepy — means they’re underperforming
  • Underperforming — means less work is being done
  • Less work being done — means that customers get less product
  • Customers receive less — means they pay less
  • Customers pay less — means the company has less money
  • The company has less money — means there is less money for wages
  • Less money for wages — means low wages

What needs to be done to increase wages?

Obviously, the coffee machine needs to be fixed: fixing it will make everyone drink coffee again, make them feel more invigorated, make them work harder, customers will get more, so they will pay more, and the company will have more money and can increase wages.

Although this sequence of interactions may seem anecdotal, too long and unrealistic, there are indeed companies where the coffee machine can have such a strong influence. These are programming companies, where programmers drink an extraordinary amount of coffee. If the coffee machine breaks down, the company can face a real collapse, where a day’s downtime will result in higher losses than the cost of a new coffee machine. This is exactly the effect of a coffee machine in a real programming company, and this is the story we got.

As funny as it sounds, the story of the coffee machine is real, it actually happened. We came across this story and we saw that anecdotal cases can illustrate very well the real interaction of processes and all the complexity of that interaction.

It is also important to understand another thing: no matter how many similarities there are between companies and their processes, they are unique and different. It is only by understanding the specific causes of problems that something can be improved. The problem may be the coffee machine, but it is unlikely to be that simple.