Bottlenecks & MetricsThe invisible bottleneck
The invisible bottleneck
Your team’s deliveries are slipping, but everyone swears they’re 100% busy. No one can point to where work actually stalls. You must find and fix the bottleneck using data, not hunches.
In 4 rounds, find the constraint through data, subordinate the system to it, and protect it from surprises, dropping Lead Time and raising predictability.
The concept behind this mission
A bottleneck is the stage that sets the capacity of the whole system, and it is rarely the one complaining loudest. It shows up in the data before it shows up in the meeting: a queue growing at the entry of a column, items aging at the same point, throughput that will not rise no matter how many people you hire. Here you read flow metrics to find where work actually stops, and decide whether to subordinate the rest to the bottleneck or to relieve it.
Starting point and target
The mission opens with these numbers. Closing within the target depends on the decisions you make each round.
- WIP14 items
- Lead Time19 days
- Blocked1
- Predictability45%
- Lead Time up to 12 days
- Predictability at least 70%
- LevelPractitioner
Go deeper into the concept
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