Critical Chain - Eliyahu M. Goldratt [60]
"And group consensus is vital," Ruth added.
Fred continuously repeated, "If the team doesn't buy in, results will not follow."
They didn't have to press so hard; I would give my left arm for the opportunity to try our ideas on a real project.
Now it's Thursday, and for the last three hours I've been talking to the team assigned to the development of the A226 modem. I don't know a thing about modems, nevertheless, I have succeeded in convincing them that I do know a lot about the pitfalls of managing a project. It wasn't easy, but I was able to get a true consensus on the current situation. It's written on the board.
1. We are accustomed to believing that the only way to protect the whole is through protecting the completion date of each step.
As a result,
2. We pad each step with a lot of safety time.
3. We are suffering from three mechanisms which, when combined, waste most of the safety time: a: student syndrome, b: multi-tasking and c: delays accumulate and advances do not.
We also agreed, and that was much easier, on what does make sense: the five focusing steps are also written on the board.
The real challenge is still ahead. Can I convince them to adopt the logical derivative of all that's written on the board? Can I lead them to develop the solution?
I take a deep breath and dive in.
"So what is the constraint of a project? What should we choose as the equivalent to the bottleneck?"
No answer.
Since they are interested in the subject, such silence can mean only one thing. I asked a question that demands too big a leap. I'll have to slice it into smaller chunks.
"Okay. What I'm asking you now is to ignore the pile of problems that you currently face and imagine the following scenario. You developed an excellent product, the A226 has been released on time and marketing turned it into a big success. Where is the constraint of the company?"
"In production," one answers.
"For sure," another backs him up. "With our best products, production never succeeds in adequately supplying the initial market demand."
"So in our futuristic scenario, there probably will be a bottleneck in production. What is a bottleneck?" And I answer my own question, "a bottleneck is a resource with capacity that is not sufficient to produce the quantities that the market demands. In this way the bottleneck prevents the company from making more money."
They don't have a problem with that.
"Let's go back to the situation as it now stands. The A226 is in your court, in engineering. What now prevents Genemodem from making more money from A226?"
"We haven't finished developing it yet."
"Exactly," I say. "So, in engineering, the desired performance is not quantity but? . . ."
"Finishing the development on time." They don't have any problem answering.
Mark is not entirely happy. "Or before time," he must interject.
We are in the team's room; there must be a PERT chart of their project somewhere. I locate it hanging on the opposite wall. It's big and colorful. I cross the room and stand beside it.
"Look on this chart," I ask them. "It represents all that has to be done to develop your modem. What dictates the lead time from start to finish of this project?"
"The critical path," they immediately answer.
"So what is the constraint of a project? What should we choose as the equivalent to the bottleneck?" I repeat.
"The critical path."
It is as simple as that. Why did it take me a whole week of floundering until I found the answer? Probably because the obvious is sometimes the last thing we see.
"Fine," I say. "We identified the constraint. What do we have to do to exploit it?"
"Don't waste it."
I fooled myself long enough on answers that look good but are meaningless. What's the meaning of "don't waste the critical path?"
It doesn't have any meaning until you express it in different words, and that's what I have to squeeze out of them. I had a hard time doing just that with my class; now I'm much better prepared.
"Don't waste what?" I ask.