Find the bottleneck
Balance flow, not capacity
I worked for a business with an expensive problem. For some important products, it often took more than two weeks to provide customers with price quotes. The delay was driven by the time it took our suppliers to provide their related cost quotes. By then, our customer had often bought elsewhere.
With colleagues, I developed a quoting tool using statistical analysis of historic supplier cost quotes. Instead of waiting for every response, we estimated costs with enough confidence to quote to our customers faster. Turnaround fell to around one day (a 10x improvement) and win rates increased.
We had not improved everything. We had removed the obstacle holding everything else back. Every system has a bottleneck: the stage, decision or resource that sets the pace. Improve it and the whole system improves.
The slowest car sets the speed
What you have learned is that the capacity of the plant is equal to the capacity of its bottlenecks. - Eliyahu Goldratt
A friend once drove me 100 miles to a Phil Collins concert. For a long stretch of road, there were few safe places to overtake. Somewhere ahead, perhaps ten cars in front, was a slow driver.
Every car behind may have been capable of going faster, but it made no difference. Making the fifth car faster achieves nothing if it cannot pass the car ahead. Traffic speeds up only when the slow car does.
Businesses work the same way. A process may have ten stages, but one usually limits output. Improving the other nine may increase efficiency without increasing finished work.
Efficiency can make things worse
An hour saved at a non-bottleneck is a mirage. - Eliyahu Goldratt
Imagine one machine produces 100 components an hour and the next can handle only 20. Running the first flat out does not increase output. It creates a queue of 80 components an hour.
The first machine looks productive; the factory is not. Work that cannot pass through the bottleneck creates delay. The goal is not maximum activity, but maximum flow.
Find where the work stalls
If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing. - W. Edwards Deming
Finding the bottleneck starts by making the work visible. Choose a result and list the steps needed to produce it.
Take this weekly blog: choose a topic, gather notes, outline, draft, edit, record and publish. Choosing the topic can take me several days and little else starts until I have done it. The key question is not which stage feels hardest, but which limits finished output.
Exploit before investing
Decide how to exploit the system’s constraint. - Eliyahu Goldratt
I worked for a business making plastic pellets used in washing machines and cars. In one old factory, material moved through pipes that sometimes blocked. Operators hit them to restart production so often that some originally round pipes had become almost square. The rest of the factory could work perfectly, but if one important pipe blocked, production stopped.
Once a constraint is found, don’t assume the answer is more money. First get more from what we have. If approvals slow a project, send smaller sections as they are completed. If meetings fragment concentration, group them together. If a small change increases output, we have probably found the constraint. Only then consider adding people, equipment or software.
Don’t improve the wrong things
The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. - Michael Porter
Bottleneck thinking becomes uncomfortable when the constraint is work we dislike doing. I enjoy building products. Adding a feature or writing code feels productive. But I am increasingly aware that my constraint is often getting ideas in front of potential users and learning whether they solve a problem people care about.
Another feature cannot solve a shortage of customers. We gravitate towards work we enjoy, but improvement means concentrating effort where it changes total output.
The bottleneck will move
Do not let inertia become the system constraint. - Eliyahu Goldratt
Fixing a bottleneck does not eliminate constraints. It moves them. A business short of leads may improve marketing, only to find that sales, onboarding, production or support now limits growth.
The danger is continuing to invest in what produced the last breakthrough. Yesterday’s bottleneck can become today’s comfort zone. So repeat the process: find the constraint, get more from it, invest if necessary, then ask: what is limiting us now?
Productivity is a systems problem
A bad system will beat a good person every time. - W. Edwards Deming
Much productivity advice focuses on personal effort: wake earlier, work harder, concentrate longer. That helps only when personal effort is the constraint. Often it is not. The limiting factor may be an unmade decision, missing information, unreliable software or work waiting for approval. Working harder upstream merely creates a bigger queue.
Systems move at the pace of their constraints. Before trying to improve everything, find what is setting the speed. Then work on that.
Want more?
Find and Fix Your Weakest Link talk by Tiago Forte
Four Ways to Prioritise Tasks and Optimise Productivity post by Phil Martin
Three Ways I Achieve More post by Phil Martin
Eliyahu Goldratt distilled the idea: “Balance flow, not capacity.”
Have fun.
Phil…
