What's Your Bottleneck to Success?
How to make your project flow.
👋 Hey, Kyle here! Welcome to The Influential Project Manager, a weekly newsletter covering the essentials of successful project leadership.
Today’s Overview:
A bottleneck occurs when there is not enough capacity to meet the demand or throughput for a product or service.
The bottleneck determines a production system’s output. If you want to improve productivity, you must recognize that the bottleneck dictates how much your system produces. Manage it, or let it manage you.
If your team runs faster than your bottleneck, they’re just being busy, not productive. This piece is meant to help you find and manage the bottlenecks hiding in your projects.
What’s Your Bottleneck to Success?
Filed under: Lean Tools & Tactics, Project Management
Where is your bottleneck?
Every project has one. It’s your job to identify it ASAP.
Let me explain…
I recently did a project review with one of my teams. They came as well prepared as I’ve ever seen.
They shared their project plan. They walked me through their P6 schedule. They showed me their documents, logistics, and came up with a 2-page document full of assumptions, ideas, and questions.
The problem? They couldn’t make the boat go faster.
This was a complex healthcare project. They’ve done a lot of things right in setting it up. They had:
A plan and team that most PMs can only dream of.
All the tools and executive support they needed.
Risks under control and a healthy budget.
But even with all this, they weren’t getting close to the speed they had planned and expected.
They tried everything: more resources, better processes, different tools. Nothing worked.
This made me think of one of the most important books on manufacturing and operations management: “The Goal” by Eliyahu Goldratt.
Have you heard of it?
In a nutshell, the book tells the story of plant manager Alex, who has 3 months to turn around the productivity of a manufacturing operation. He learns to simplify the problem to the ultimate goal of the organization.
Once he understands the true goal, he identifies the bottlenecks and improves those, while “ignoring” the productivity of the rest of the process.
And in true Disney fashion, he lives happily ever after.
You see… everything they’d tried so far, was trying to increase productivity of the entire process.
But here’s the thing: any improvement in productivity in any other place than the bottleneck is not only a waste of time - it makes things worse.
What are bottlenecks?
A bottleneck is a point of congestion in a production system (such as an assembly line, a project, or a computer network) that stops or slows the system. It can be a phase, resource, person, or process that can’t keep up with the demand. Bottlenecks might stem from:
Insufficient resources.
Overloaded team members.
Intricate approval processes.
A lack of clarity in delegating tasks.
Like the neck of a bottle slows down the flow of water, a bottleneck in project management affects the workflow. Bottlenecks manifest as points of congestion, restricting the flow of work, tasks, information, or resources. They can cause:
Efficiency to dwindle.
Timelines to extend.
Resources to strain.
The bottleneck determines a system’s output. If you want to improve productivity, you must recognize that the bottleneck dictates how much your system produces. Manage it, or let it manage you.
The truth is that if your team runs faster than your bottleneck, they’re just being busy, not productive.
There are multiple categories of bottlenecks according to Goldratt:
Resource constraints: This can be a tool, machine, server, or cash.
Policy constraints: Rules, policies, metrics, or regulations that distort flow.
Permanent constraints: Limiting factors always present, such as lack of management support or cultural issues.
Your bottleneck can be a thing, a person, a process, or even poor communication.
How do you find your bottleneck?
I bet there’s one burning question on your mind…
Question: How do I find MY bottleneck?
It’s easier than you think, now that you what a bottleneck is. They tend to reveal themselves by the long queues of work that build up in front of them.
The quick answer is:
Find the long queue / big build-up of work in your process, team, or project, and then look for your bottleneck somewhere in the process just after that.
The slightly longer answer is:
1. List the major steps in your process.
You can’t manage what you can’t see, so make your workflow visible.
If you like bullet points, use bullet points.
If you like pictures, draw a picture.
If you have a whiteboard, map it out on that.
If you work with physical things like widgets or construction, walk around the jobsite and list the steps as you go.
2. Look for your bottleneck by doing one or all of the following:
Look for the build-up of work (the queue) in front of it. Your bottleneck step will be nearby.
Look for the idle resources. Your bottleneck step will happen before that.
Estimate roughly how many things (invoices, answers, quantities, etc.) can be done by each step/resource each minute/hour/month). The bottleneck resource should jump out at you.
3. If there are multiple resources doing that step - figure out which one is slowing things down.
Ask “5 Whys” to get to the root cause of your bottleneck.
Collect data on workload and cycle times for analysis to examine how resources are distributed.
Dig deep to find the underlying reasons for bottlenecks.
4. Once you think you’ve found your bottleneck, try to prove yourself wrong.
If you can’t, you’ve probably found your bottleneck. If you can, keep looking.
Keep a constant eye on the process and make improvements as necessary for ongoing optimization.
🚧 Real-Life Example
On one of my construction projects, we were trying to speed up the interior build-out phase. We noticed that the in-wall MEP installations were taking much longer than expected, creating a backlog and slowing down the drywall work.
Production Rates:
Framing crew: 100 linear feet of walls per day
In-wall MEP crew: 50 linear feet per day
Overhead MEP crew: 70 linear feet per day
Drywall crew: 90 linear feet per day
The in-wall MEP crew was significantly slower, creating a bottleneck. This meant that the speed of the in-wall MEP work was controlling how fast we could build out the interior rooms on the floor.
Here’s what we did:
Increased the number of workers on the in-wall MEP crew.
Pre-fabricated as much of the in-wall components as possible.
Improved coordination between the framing and MEP crews.
After these changes, the in-wall MEP crew’s production rate increased to 80 linear feet per day. This helped stabilize the workflow better, reduce the wait time for the drywall crew, and improve our overall schedule. By identifying and taming the bottleneck, we managed to improve our schedule and work pace, without touching anything else.
Final Takeaways
You’ll be surprised how a few small changes can make such a big difference.
Your team will will be calmer, happier, and faster than they’ve ever been.
Each bottleneck situation is different. You need to think on your feet, try stuff, and see what works and what doesn’t.
In line with the Lean management principle of continuous improvement, it’s important to view bottleneck analysis as ongoing. That’s why the right project management tools can come in particularly handy when finding the bottlenecks.
Numerous providers offer Kanban boards, but INGENIOUS.BUILD stands out by providing extra features that enable you to establish Kanban WIP limits for both swim-lanes and statuses. To dive deeper into how Kanban can improve your workflow, check out their growing collection of resources dedicated to streamlining workflows.
To wrap up, the goal here was not to scare you out of project management. The goal is to plant an idea. To make you think.
Zoom out and look at your current project: what’s your bottleneck?
Until next week,
Kyle Nitchen
🧰 Kyle’s Toolbox
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