Theory of Constraints Handbook - James Cox Iii [513]
Personnel develops a competitive pay package for workers.
The bank provides workers with advanced training.
The bank conducts exit interviews to determine reasons for turnover.
Personnel uses the bank’s best workers to train new workers.
Top management recognizes the difference between turnover and growth.
Table 25-6 illustrates the obstacles and injections that the bank developed for the injection, “Personnel develops a competitive pay package for workers.”
The PRT for the injection is illustrated in Fig. 25-31.
A few things to note:
1. It is usually easier to build the PRTs by starting with the most ominous injections (the injections that seem most difficult to achieve). By doing so, you will typically address the “easier” injections in the process, and you will avoid multiple versions of the same tree.
2. Most of the intermediate objectives and injections are verbalized as entities rather than actions. An objective, whether it is an intermediate objective or a high-level injection, is a condition to be achieved, and an action is something that is done to achieve an objective. The place where we would expect to see IOs written more in the form of actions would be at the “bottom” of the tree; such IOs do not have other IOs pointing to them. At that level, we generally “know what to do,” and the initial obstacles to be overcome are relatively minor. We will see actions in the TRT and as in tactics in the S&T.
3. Each arrow represents the obstacle that exists which is preventing the injection from being achieved. If an IO is pointing to another IO (e.g., 22 pointing to 23), the obstacle (in the arrow that connects them) is also preventing the IO that is pointed to from being achieved.
4. Verify that each obstacle is, in fact, an entity that exists in the current reality of the system. If it does not, it is an imagined obstacle, not a real obstacle, so there is no need to implement an IO to overcome it.
FIGURE 25-31 Bank PRT for injection, “a competitive pay package for workers is in place.”
5. Validate the obstacle causality—is the existence of the entity that is claimed to be the obstacle really an obstacle to the achievement of the injection or the IO? If it is not, then there is no reason to implement an IO to overcome it.
6. Verify the IO causality—will the IO really overcome the obstacle and open the door to implementation of the higher IO or injection to which it is pointing? If not, you need to select a different IO.
As the PRTs are developed for each injection, identify any necessary condition relationships that exist among various IOs or injections. This will help you integrate the implementation, rather than simply having a collection of injections to implement. When the bank added to the PRT those IOs it defined to achieve the injection, “The bank conducts exit interviews to determine reasons for turnover,” the PRT expanded as shown in Fig. 25-32.
The full PRT, as the bank team wrote it, is illustrated in Appendix E of this chapter found on the McGraw-Hill website: http://www.mhprofessional.com/TOCHandbook.
Transition Tree
Nothing happens until something moves.
—Albert Einstein
We finally reach the place where the rubber meets the road—it’s time for action! Some injections and IOs are “no-brainers” to implement. There are others that you know intuitively are risky unless you plan each step in a highly detailed, even choreographed, fashion. For instance, conducting buy-in meetings with other stakeholders in the organization, conducting important sales meetings with buyers or negotiation meetings with suppliers all fall under the category of actions that should be planned meticulously. This is the function of the TRT.
The TRT provides a way to construct an intended action plan (a sequence of actions to be taken) so that the need for each action, the predicted effects of each action, and the appropriate conditions that need to be in place to trigger an action to be taken (and thus the logic of the