This week’s challenge involved a major bottleneck in the development process which was inefficient and ineffective and causing lengthy delays for customers.

I’m always amazed that when faced with a problem, I will often come across timely and useful advice if I just go and look for it.

So looking for inspiration, I picked up a book by David Maister, a well-respected management thinker and former Harvard Business School professor, who wrote:

There are relatively few new ideas in business, if any at all. How often can one repeat the basic advice of ‘Listen to your clients, look for and eliminate inefficiencies, and act like team players.”

Bottlenecks are at their most dangerous when the business or project is busy because they will become the single limiting factor of the team’s success.

This theory of limiting factors in struggling businesses was succinctly summed up in Eli Goldratt’s seminal business book The Goal based on his Theory of Constraints.

Goldratt’s theory is that every business has at least one critical constraint or bottleneck (the term I prefer) which is the ‘weakest link in the chain’ and holding the business back.

The irony about bottlenecks is that they often hide in plain sight. And whilst most businesses intuitively know where the bottlenecks are, tackling them is a whole different game.

For that reason, bottlenecks are often tolerated as part of the business – the status quo – and are left unaddressed until they become the ‘number one critical constraint’.

When the bottleneck is visibly holding back the entire business it must be dealt with. Temporary workarounds to remove a short-term log jam can often make the problem worse.

So what can you do to remove a bottleneck?

Here are a few ideas:

1. Can the process or system be automated using newer tools or technology?
2. Can it be outsourced and done by somebody with better tools or skills?
3. Can it be simplified or even replaced altogether with a better solution?

I believe it takes a lot of courage and creativity for businesses to remove bottlenecks especially if they involve entrenched or critical processes of the organisation.

But it is in these precise moments that we need to be brave and as a team, figure out how to remove the bottleneck. This is aptly summed up by David Maister again:

The problem [in business], clearly, is not figuring out what to do. Rather, the problem is to find the strength and courage to do what we know to be right.

What is your critical bottleneck and what can you do about it today?

Quotations taken from True Professionalism by David H Maister (1997), The Free Press