Five simple steps

I have been involved with Agile for nine years.  One of the most significant discoveries of my agile journey is the realization that I am learning new things and continuously improving how I conduct my servant leadership.  I was encouraged to read Eliyahu M. Goldratt’s “The Goal,” which exposed me to the theory of constraints.  Now that I have finished the book, I have a few thoughts.

I have written about the theory of constraints in the past.  The book's main gist is to identify organizational bottlenecks or limitations.  Once you find a restriction, work can be done to mitigate the effects of that obstacle.  It seems common sense, but in the rush and frustration of our daily jobs, we often miss these common-sense approaches.

Goldratt shows his most revealing insight. The mitigation of constraints follows a clear and easy-to-reduce process. The process is as follows:

1. Identify the system's constraint.
2. Decide how to exploit the system constraint
3. Subordinate everything else to the above decisions
4. Elevate the system constraint
5. If a constraint has been broken in the previous steps, return to step 1, but do not allow inertia to cause a system constraint.

Five steps, and it does not matter if you are working in a machine shop or managing a bunch of creative professionals, a person can improve the efficiency of a process.

I have been struggling with the notion of exploiting and subordinating a constraint.  Fortunately, the theory of constraints has plenty of academic support and an excellent blog about these five steps.  I look forward to using them at my firm.

Until next time.