When organizations face performance problems, the first place to look is often to the people involved. The staff need more training. The team could do with a bit more motivation. There might be just one additional person who could help share the load. However, it’s often the case that the bottleneck isn’t in the people who do the work but the systems they have to work with.
The challenge of finding the real bottlenecks in your operations is that many people look at the symptoms of an issue rather than identifying what is constraining performance. Organizations that misdiagnose performance problems will invest in ineffective solutions. The effectiveness of the diagnosis will determine whether you attempt to improve performance makes a difference.
The People Problem that Isn’t
The most common misdiagnosis is of people as the source of performance problems that systems have created. If things are taking too long, people are assumed to be the problem. If mistakes happen, it’s assumed that better training is needed. If something slips, hiring more people seems like the solution.
But watch what people do when executing a task. They spend far too much time looking for information they should have at their fingertips. They have to enter the same information several times because systems do not talk to one another. They have to make workarounds because of gaps in the process. They have to wait for approvals to bottlenecks because workflows are not apparent. It’s not that people aren’t working quickly but that systems make them do unnecessary work.
This bottleneck in your operations isn’t something that better training will solve. Even if a person knows what they are looking for, they will not work quickly if it takes 20 minutes to find it. Hiring more people will just give you more people in a broken system.
The Process Bottleneck
Your bottleneck might come from process rather than systems. Workflows that worked when your organization was smaller create delays once you’ve grown. Approval processes that seemed reasonable get in the way when demand increases. Processes that you designed to ensure quality through manual intervention now take far too long.
Process bottlenecks hide behind “we have always done it this way.” This phrase was used to justify workflows because someone set them up a long time ago and nobody has thought to see whether it is still valid. By now, it’s standard practice, and every piece of work follows this perceived boundary into value-adding work.
To find process bottlenecks in your operations, map how work should flow through your organization against how it does in practice. The gaps indicate where constraints bind. More often than not, organizations find that value-adding activities only account for a small part of the elapsed time in these flows. The rest is just waiting or reworking due to design flaws in the process.
The System Constraint
The system constraint is the most insidious bottleneck in your operations because it affects everything but it’s never seen. Mediocre technology infrastructures slow everything down by increments. Tools that do not work together require data transfer. Reporting capabilities might be basic, so you do not gain any insights into what the organization does. Systems that do not feature automation lose people unnecessary time on mundane tasks.
System constraints compound the time an activity takes. An activity that should take 10 minutes takes 20 minutes because the system cannot deal with it efficiently. A 10-minute task now involves 20 minutes of work on a routine basis, multiplied by dozens of tasks per day, and hundreds of interactions between employees.
For organizations that provide training and assessment services related to student records, program delivery, and compliance reporting, the system constraint might be constraining everything without your noticing it. Providers in educational contexts such as Australia’s VET sector feel this constraint most keenly when standard tools cannot accommodate their unique requirements. Custom-designed products such as https://cloudassess.com/ relieve this constraint by building the infrastructure around training organizations instead of around their systems.
Diagnosing the Real Constraint
Identifying whether the constraint is people, process, or system-based requires keen observation of what happens in your organization. It’s not about making assumptions about what the problem might be but looking at where things stop moving. You should also observe how time is consumed when people in your organization do their jobs. Ask staff what prevents them from doing their jobs. They usually know where the constraints lie.
People constraints appear as skill deficits in specific individuals who can’t execute the processes needed to perform their jobs. Training or hiring can solve these problems immediately. If people can do their jobs if you give them the correct tools, then the constraint is not people.
Process constraints are easy to identify because they create delays between completing steps in a task being executed. The task may need additional approvals before it is executed, or it may just sit in a queue instead of being acted on immediately. You can solve these constraints by redesigning the process without delays around workflows, not the execution of tasks.
Systems constraints appear as friction in executing tasks. Things take longer to happen than they should because people must do unnecessary things because the systems supporting them are inefficient. Good infrastructure removes these constraints.
The Cost of Misdiagnosing
A wrong diagnosis wastes time and resources attacking the wrong solution to what you think is a problem affecting performance in your organization. Training staff who already know how to do their jobs will not improve their performance. Hiring more people into a broken system will not improve performance; identifying the real bottlenecks in your operations is essential to using resources efficiently.
The cost of misdiagnosing also comes from an opportunity cost perspective. While you spend resources solving what you perceive to be an issue, a constraint that continues to adversely affect performance levels continues unabated in your organization while other organizations with correctly diagnosed problems improve their situation.
Finding the Real Bottleneck
Most performance problems in organizations occur due to systems and processes rather than people. People want to do their jobs well and they will do it if you create an infrastructure that helps them. Most of the time, the problem is with the systems supporting those people.
By accurately diagnosing the real constraint, you can eliminate it, and avoid wasting time on inadequate solutions that try to resolve problems you think are affecting performance in your organization. You can enhance your infrastructure to avoid unnecessary friction, improve your processes so there are no delays in workflows, and concentrate on improving skills rather than trying to hire more people to fix a problem that isn’t theirs but with the execution of their tasks.
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