TOC in Action
I have a regular Google Alert for articles and blog posts that mention Theory of Constraints. The typical find is general materials on business improvement, rather than specific materials on TOC. But there are the occasional finds like The Theory of Constraints’ “Five Focusing Steps” in action by Pascal Van Cauwenberghe.
Pascal works in a development shop and goes through the Five Focusing Steps as they apply in his world. Very nice. My only quibble is with the use of the term "bottleneck" instead of "constraint." The idea of a bottleneck generally has negative connotations - as in "get rid of the bottleneck."
The result of this work? They eliminated the development team as a constraint:
The team got better and better by repeatedly going through the five focusing steps. After a while, they started to develop stories faster than customers could write them. Thats when we needed to apply focusing steps six and seven.
I assume the last sentence means they had to start back at Step 1 again. It sounds like the Market became the constraint. Or maybe they need to revisit Step 0: define the goal of the system and take a wider view of the system, and then have another look.
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KJolt Memberships
Jack,
thanks for the link and comments.
I don't mind calling myself or my team bottleneck. There's nothing negative about 'bottleneck', as I teach people. I usually use 'constraint' to denote non-physical bottlenecks like policy constraints.
In the situation in the blog, the market risked becoming the constraint, so we took measures to avoid that. When we've exhausted the five focusing steps (and we come into the realm of policy constraints, system/organisation structure) we apply two further focusing steps. We teach those extra steps with a game: http://www.agilecoach.net/coach-tools/bottleneck-game/
The game is licensed Creative Commons: anyone can use and reuse it.