Five simple steps.

Constraints matter.

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

I have written about the theory of constraints in the past.  The main gist of the book is to identify bottleneck or limitations in an organization.  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 reproduce the 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 in the previous steps a constraint have been broken 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.