Goldratt's Steps for Improvement

In his first book 'The Goal', Dr Eliyahu Goldratt released his Theory of Constaints to the world; this book introduced a series of rules that apply to process flows, such as those found in factories. These ideas were later re-iterated in 'The Phoenix Project' by Gene Kim, which is a book largely credited for the spreading of DevOps across IT.

In this book he addresses steps for improvement, which are mostly mirrored in 'The Phoenix Project'.

  1. Identify the constraint – What is the main thing that's restricting throughput?
    In the phoenix project, this turns out to be a senior engineer called Brent who a lot of project work has to go through
  2. Exploit the constraint – What can be done to temporarily maximise usage of the constraint?
    To achieve this they increase Brent's throughput by telling him to stop doing ad-hoc work, meaning he gets more project work done
  3. Subordinate everything else to the constraint – How can the rest of the system work based on the constraint?
    This was achieved through a feature freeze, allowing Ops to catch up to the ongoing work
  4. Elevate the constraint - What can be done to permanently increase throughput of the constraint?
    Brent had some senior engineers attached to him, and they are told to answer all incoming requests, then ask him only if they can't help, and to then document the fix; this allowed Brent's individual workload to decrease and increased the work through his section
  5. Avoid Momentum - Once the constraint has been elevated, a new constraint should emerge, this should then be the next item to work on.

I don't really have any conclusions, have a nice day!