Theory of Constraints Handbook - James Cox Iii [319]
The next section provides the details and lessons learned of how to do a holistic TOC implementation within the public sector (the story of a sustainable cities program for Africa) and the following section provides the details and lessons learned on how to do a holistic TOC implementation within the private sector (the story of First Solar).
Holistic Implementation of TOC in the Public Sector
Over the past 25 years, TOC has helped thousands of for-profit organizations5 improve their performance and decision making. However, despite TOC’s universality to help identify and unlock inherent potential within any goal-orientated system, few not-for-profit (NFP) organizations have attempted to apply TOC and even fewer have attempted a holistic TOC implementation.6
Typical reasons include a perception that TOC is probably too complex or sophisticated for their organization, or that since many of these NFP organizations do not have clear goal statements such as “Make more money now as well as in the future,” TOC will probably not work for them. In addition, it is claimed that for any NFP to reach consensus that TOC should be implemented on a holistic basis or even just evaluated for implementation is an order of magnitude more difficult than in for-profit organizations due to the large number of stakeholders involved.
In this case study, we want to share the experience and insights gained on how a new simplified TOC holistic analysis, consensus building, and active contribution approach can help achieve the very ambitious target of “doing more with the same or less in less time” even in NFP organizations. This new simplified win-win-win approach is based on combining TOC’s enabling paradigms (discussed later) with its Five Focusing Steps (5FS) and Thinking Processes (TP), as well as the simple planning and execution rules recommended by the logistical solutions of TOC, to help all stakeholders identify and unlock inherent potential within the “system” for which an NFP organization is responsible.
Background
In January 2007, Mr. Michael Funcke-Bartz of InWEnt-Capacity Building International, Germany, in the framework of the German Development Cooperation requested the assistance of two TOC experts (Dr. Alan Barnard, CEO of Goldratt Research Labs and Professor Antoine van Gelder, Head of the Department of Internal Medicine University of Pretoria) with the objective to test whether a simplified TOC constraint analysis and strategy development approach (Barnard, 2003), could be used to help cities close the growing gap between demand and supply, especially for basic services. By 2007, InWEnt already had a few successful TOC-based projects from the public (improving management capacities in water utilities) and the private sectors (strengthening of small- and medium-sized enterprises) in developing countries (Funcke-Bartz, 2006) but indicated they wanted to test the impact of a more holistic approach to using TOC to supplement and potentially focus their own capacity-building efforts.
InWEnt suggested that this could be done with African cities from UN-HABITAT’s Sustainable Cities Programme, which had applied for capacity-building assistance in the field of municipal solid waste management, because of its potential contribution to city sustainability and poverty alleviation.
To ensure the best possible start to such an initiative, InWEnt required these cities, to organize a one-week Strategy Workshop with representatives of all-important stakeholders such as national and local governments, public and private service providers, the community and academic institutions.
Invited stakeholders were informed that the objective of the workshop was first to work together to develop a common understanding around the cause-effect relationships between the various challenges