theory+of+constraints category archives
My friend (and neighbor) Johanna Rothman has a piece in her newsletter which she calls, Park Projects You Can't Staff, For Now. It's a very good way of describing the common problem businesses put themselves into: too much work in process.
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John Kotter's Leading Change has been sitting on my should-read list for quite a while, particularly since my association with the MS-LOC program at Northwestern. It's also come up a number of times on a Theory of Constraints mailing list as a must read to get a better understanding of why change implementations get stuck and what to do about it.
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Do you want to do things well, or do the right things? The difference between efficiency and effectiveness is exactly this difference.
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What do you think of when you hear about constraints? Do you want to eliminate them? Do you want to change them? Or do you know that they are a fact of life? It all depends on your perspective and what you think those constraints do.
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How many times to you or a colleague have a brilliant insight that will solve the world's problems? Does that insight go anywhere, or does it sit on the pile of other insights? Or you try to do something with it but run into roadblocks that make the idea harder harder to implement. Welcome to the half-baked idea.
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Another book in my long backlog was Ray Immelman's "Great Boss Dead Boss." I finally picked up a copy and thoroughly enjoyed it. As with many good books, the ideas have me looking at the world in a slightly different way.
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I came across "Retrieving Projects from Bad Performance" on LinkedIn, in the status update of the author, Shridhar Lolla. Brief and interesting discussion with a TOC flair.
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How many systems are out there for tracking the status of a project and the tasks within that project? Whose responsibility is it to gather and compile these status reports? Is it the manager, project manager, some software? Is "get the status" the wrong things to consider? The Manager Tools podcast on "Assign Work AND Reporting" gives me a new view of this question.
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I've come across a nice article by Bob Sproull that describes how he has combined Theory of Constraints with Six Sigma and Lean to create what he calls the Ultimate Improvement Cycle, Maximizing Profits Through the Integration of Lean, Six Sigma and Theory of Constraints. Sproull is not the only one to talk about this, and there are a few pointers in the end notes of the article.
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Lisa Scheinkopf's Thinking for a Change: Putting the TOC Thinking Processes to Use came out over ten years ago, but it does a good job of describing and summarizing the Theory of Constraints (TOC) thinking processes.
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I've had Brown and Duguid's The Social Life of Information on my reading list for a long time. I finally picked up a copy at the library, and I was happily surprised that it holds up well after ten years.
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Dennis Stevens posted an article about Deming and the System of Profound Knowledge. Of course, I know who Deming is, but I don't think I'd ever seen the System of Profound Knowledge before. As Dennis describes things, I see an immediate connection to the Theory of Constraints.
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Do people and groups have an overall level of risk with which they are comfortable? If risk is reduced in one area, does it get consumed by increased risk in another area? This is the hypothesis of risk homeostasis as proposed by psychology professor Gerald J. S. Wilde. And how does this relate to buffers from Theory of Constraints?
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So often in business operations, the focus is on removing variability or eliminating waste or load leveling. But how often do you hear about these projects and wonder whether it actually does anything for the bottom line. I could write about why that is, but what has tickled me today is the idea that variability and "waste" can actually be helpful.
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It's so easy to get caught up in measuring things and forget why you are measuring.
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Do you run a pilot? It all depends on the scale of the pilot. And on the network in which the pilot operates.
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I was sent a complimentary copy of The Imperfect Leader because I've been reading and reviewing a number of other business novels. As you might guess from the title, this one focuses on leadership.
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I've been meaning to read Bill Dettmer's The Logical Thinking Processes for a while. It covers the "thinking processes" as defined by the Theory of Constraints community. And these are a larger structure of tools used to help describe and define Change programs. In the TOC community, change is defined by What to Change, What to Change To, and How to Cause the Change.
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Kevin Kelly at The Technium talks about The Shirky Principle, which is "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." This reminds me of the 5th Theory of Constraints Focusing Step: don't let inertia become your constraint.
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Pointers to a couple case studies on process improvement from MIT and focusing on a division of Ford Motor Complany.
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James Robertson's "Knowledge managers: stuck in the shadow of immortal figures" has inspired some interesting discussion, both on his blog and in at least one email discussion list.
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My review of Chip and Dan Heath's new book, Switch. It has been making the rounds of my networks, and now it sits next to me with lots of dog-eared paged and underlinings. And special thanks to Tammy Green for adding another point of view to my thoughts here.
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Visible buffers give management a way to manage the system. And they also give the project participants a way to guage
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"Super Size Productivity Now: 3% Automation, 97% Leadership" by Kathleen Brush talks about how organizations can create more real productivity - and it's nearly all down to leadership.
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My review of Simplifying Innovation by Michael A Dalton, a business novel that shows how Constraints Management principles can be applied to new product development and other areas that require a lot of innovation.
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You have to be careful with "culture" discussions because they can lead you down some strange paths. Ana Neves has an interesting discussion around knowledge management, and I see them applying to just about anything that wants a specific culture as part of the strategy.
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Velocity is a business novel from the Theory of Constraints community with co-author Jeff Cox coming at TOC again after his work with The Goal years ago. This one introduces combined improvement efforts that are designed to set direction AND give you speed: Velocity.
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I picked up Eli Goldratt's latest business novel, Isn't It Obvious, and absolutely flew through the book. The title of the book is one of Goldratt's favorite ideas: that the best theories are always seen (in hindsight) as obvious solutions.
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Glen Alleman has some interesting thoughts about uncertainty in projects and whether we need to estimate better. I wonder if theory of constraints and buffer management points to a different solution.
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My thoughts about David Allen's 2009 book, Making It All Work, an extension to Getting Things Done. I also make a connection to some of my other work, beyond the obvious organizing and prioritizing that come from the book.
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Henrik Mårtensson has a nice discussion of how an extreme focus on "cost effectiveness" can severely damage an organization with this mindset.
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Several conversations have me thinking about why projects - any kind of project - falls off the rails so many times, even though people have articulated the lists of why this happens over and over again.
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How Smart Leaders Talk About Time is a "Conversation Starter" from HarvardBusiness.org in October. It talks about the the struggle so many businesses have of having too many things to do and prioritizing amongst them. What is a leader to do?
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In case you think I am a dyed-in-the-wool Theory of Constraints promoter, I point to this article by Dan Trietsch from a 2005 issue of Project Management Journal.
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Dennis Stevens has a nice description of how Theory of Constraints and Big Agile relate to each other. I've known that the do, but I hadn't given much thought to the connections.
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The fundamentals of CCPM workshop was interesting in that I saw some new simulations (games) and he put the vicious cycle of standard operations in a drawing that made a lot of sense to me.
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Luis Suarez pointed to an entertaining YouTube video produced by one of his IBM colleagues, which has me pondering the tendency we (in business) have of jumping from bad effects to a "solution" without understanding the underlying cause.
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This week, I get to spend several days in San Francisco at Realization's Project Flow 2009 conference. Hopefully, I get to meet some additional friends.
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A week ago, the Sunday Boston Globe carried a piece on Eugene Litvak's work on helping hospitals improve. Flow is the key.
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Tesco is using weather forecasts to predict demand. Instead, it might be a better idea to design the supply chain to be flexible and fast to respond to actual changes in consumer demand.
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Information overload can be considered an individual problem to be solved by many of the rules I've written about in my own journey around personal effectiveness. Or it can be thought of as part of a larger system of people interacting that needs to be addressed with a systematic approach.
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A colleague forwarded a copy of "Manage a Living system, Not a Ledger" by H. Thomas Johnson. It is a great discussion of why traditional financial measures, while required for accounting reporting, are terrible for internal decision making.
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My weekly Google Alert for Theory of Constraints popped up this One-Minute Take-Away on The Goal. The brief article gives you this graphic and then a brief explanation.
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The Manufaturer has published a video interview with Eli Goldratt and Will Stirling, which appears to have been recorded after a seminar that Goldratt gave.
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The recent IAM Talking podcast, "The Problems of Process, In Practice," Dan Keldsen hosts a discussion with Bob Lewis of IT Catalysts, and there are a couple of elements that really connected with me.
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I am still looking for more thinking on how to apply Theory of Constraints ideas and thinking in heavily uncertain areas like discovery research, where typical drop-out rates are well above 80%.
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There's a potential conflict between Getting Things Done and Just Do It. Here are some thoughts on the topic.
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I had lunch the other day with Johanna Rothman and the topic of planning research work came up. It is difficult to plan research work because the very nature of research is one of iteration and uncertainty. You don't know if your experiment is going to work, so how can you build a formal plan of everything you plan to do?
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The TOC ICO has awarded Boeing with its award for achievement this year.
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