Theory of Constraints Handbook - James Cox Iii [321]
Day 2 aims to cover Step 2 by helping stakeholders answer “What to Change?”—identifying the core conflicts for each stakeholder and the underlying assumptions and associated “local optima” rules and measurements that must be challenged to remove the UDEs (to close the gap).
Day 3 is dedicated to Step 3, answering “to What to Change?”—identifying the new win: win contributions, rules or measurements (the injections) that will break the core conflicts, remove the UDEs, and close the gap without creating new UDEs.
Day 4 is focused on completing Step 4 by answering “How to Cause the Change?”—identifying the possible risks (such as the injections that are not detailed enough to provide actionable information, the injections that have potential negatives or could be blocked by implementation obstacles) and how to overcome these, sequenced in an implementation roadmap.
Day 5 is focused on Step 5 to answer “How to Measure the Change and Achieve Ongoing Improvement?”—identifying the prime measurements for each stakeholder’s required contribution, allocating responsibilities, and (if time permits) converting the roadmap into a buffered but aggressive Critical Chain plan and sharing basic TOC Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) insights for managing the implementation as a portfolio of pipelined and buffered projects.
Proposed Changes to the Traditional TOC TP Analysis Roadmap
The original TOC TP Roadmap as taught in the TOC Thinking (“Jonah”) and “External Constraint Analysis” programs or the “4 × 4” Holistic Approach has proven to be an effective analysis and strategy development toolset. However, TOC practitioners that have used this TP roadmap know that there are a number of problems with the traditional process which focused on answering only the three change questions as first formulated by Goldratt (1990)—What to Change?, to What to Change?, and How to Cause the Change? Problems frequently experienced with the original TP Roadmap include the following (Barnard, 2003):
1. Starting a TOC analysis without sharing the fundamental TOC principles and paradigms of TOC needed to change the behavior of the various stakeholders such as the beliefs in inherent potential, inherent simplicity, win-win, “good enough,” and that people are good (but sometimes have bad assumptions that drive bad behaviors) as per Table 16-1.
2. Sometimes wrongly assuming there is already agreement by all stakeholders on the need for change (i.e., starting with “What to Change” rather than the gap in goal units and constraint performance and consequences for each stakeholder if this gap is not reduced to get agreement on “Why Change?”).
3. Starting the analysis simply by asking stakeholders to list their UDEs (what bothers them) rather than by asking stakeholders to contribute a short list of those few UDEs that make it difficult for them to help close the gap in goal units and constraint performance (with respect to the goal), which provides a much more relevant list of UDEs to start the TOC TP analysis with and effectively links the TOC’s 5FS with the TP.
TABLE 16-1 Improvement Challenges and the Related Limiting versus Enabling Paradigms
4. Asking stakeholders to verbalize any conflicts associated with their UDEs rather than giving specific instructions to verbalize both the symptomatic conflicts they experience in having to deal with their UDEs and the systemic conflicts of the part they are blaming for causing their UDEs as per the dual cloud process (Barnard, 2003). Not verbalizing both conflicts has two major negatives. The distrust between those blaming and those being blamed will continue and it will not be possible to find the “core conflict