Chaos Re-visited -- Dickeson

At one time we spoke of five "families" of variables: Materials, People, Equipment, Environment and Form-sequencing. The families interact both internally and externally. Not exactly wing flaps of Brazilian butterflies, but similar impacts on print production results.

So, I wrote another column titled, as I recall, Home on the Range, suggesting that we use standard ranges rather than single digit standards of time and materials. It had all the impact of lint falling from one's navel! "Too sophisticated for printers," I was told. "It screws up the pricing markups," others joked. It was true. It did mess up long-established standards assumptions and I offered no alternatives.