Mind Tools Newsletter 131 - July 14th, 2009

Unblock Your Bottlenecks!

Bottlenecks are bad for business. Serious bottlenecks can cause total melt down, while even small ones can cause serious inefficiency. And that's not counting the frustration experienced by all involved!

So, before you head towards melt down, it's well worth learning some problem-solving techniques that will help you fix things promptly and effectively, whenever the need arises.

In This Issue

Today's featured article, Unblocking Bottlenecks, helps you work through problem processes, and find ways to make them quick and effective. It introduces several great problem-solving techniques that will help you not only unblock bottlenecks, but also solve all sorts of problems that you might encounter. Read the article in full below!

As well as our featured article in this newsletter, we're also looking at Life After Job Loss and Planning an Away Day.

Meanwhile, in our members' area, the Career Excellence Club, we're taking a strong performance focus with a Coaching Clinic I Hate to Delegate, a Book Insight looking at The Three Laws of Performance, a Bite-Sized Training session on Setting Team Member Goals, and many more. More on these in the What's New? section below!

Enjoy today's articles!

James Manktelow and Rachel Thompson MindTools.com - Essential skills for an excellent career!

What's New?

	Life After Job Loss (All Readers) Coping with the Emotional Turmoil
	Losing a job can be incredibly upsetting. Learn how to recognize the emotions and setbacks you're likely to experience - and then deal with them so that you can move forward. All Readers' New Tool
	Planning an Away Day (All Readers) Getting the Most from Your Off-site Meeting
	A day away from the office can be fun for a team, but conducting an effective and useful event is another matter. Learn how to plan a successful off-site meeting. All Readers' New Tool
	I Hate to Delegate (Club Members)
	Do you find it hard to delegate tasks, but also know that you have far too much to do? Read about how Alice solved this dilemma in this Coaching Clinic. Club Members' Coaching Clinic
	The Three Laws of Performance (Club Members) By Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan
	This book explains how to implement change AND make it stick for the long term - at work, and in you personal life. Find out more about this book and its ideas in our Book Insight. Club Members' Book Insight
	Setting Goals for Members of Your Team (Club Members)
	Setting goals for other people is a key part of management and leadership, and there are a few extra steps compared with setting goals for yourself. Learn how to apply SMART principles when setting goals for others. All Members' Bite-Sized Training™

Editors' Choice Article
Unblocking Bottlenecks
Fixing Unbalanced Processes

	Where's the bottleneck in your area?

Consider this scenario: You own a trucking company, and you've recently had problems in the delivery process for one of your clients. The loading at their factory goes smoothly, but once your trucks arrive at the client's warehouse, efficiency seems to fall apart. The trucks typically wait six to eight hours before workers unload the cargo. Every minute that your trucks are parked and waiting costs your company revenue.

You investigate to find out why the trucks are forced to wait, and you discover something surprising: The reason they wait is because no one notifies the warehouse in advance of their arrival. As a result, when a truck arrives, the forklift that's needed for unloading is often being used for another task. So your truck has to wait until the forklift is free.

Now you begin to wonder why the warehouse isn't notified, as it should be, that trucks are on their way. You investigate more and learn that the person who used to call the warehouse left the company a few months ago, and the task wasn't reassigned. So you delegate the phone call to another team member, and you persuade the warehouse to purchase a second forklift - and your problem is solved.

This bottleneck was pretty easy to fix. But have you ever discovered a bottleneck in your business processes? These can be harder to resolve, mostly because they're harder to identify.

What Is a Bottleneck?

A bottleneck in a process occurs when input comes in faster than the next step can use it to create output. The term compares assets (information, materials, products, man-hours) with water. When water is poured out of a bottle, it has to pass through the bottle's neck, or opening. The wider the bottle's neck, the more water (input/assets) you can pour out. The smaller, or narrower, the bottle's neck, the less you can pour out - and you end up with a back-up, or "bottleneck."

There are two main types of bottlenecks:

1. Short-term bottlenecks - These are caused by temporary problems. A good example is when key team members become ill or go on vacation. No one else is qualified to take over their projects, which causes a backlog in their work until they return.
   
   
2. Long-term bottlenecks - These occur all the time. An example would be when a company's month-end reporting process is routinely delayed because someone has to complete a series of time-consuming tasks - and he can't even start until he has the final month-end figures.

Identifying and fixing bottlenecks is important. They can cause a lot of problems in terms of lost revenue, dissatisfied customers, wasted time, poor-quality products or services, and high stress in team members.

How to Identify Bottlenecks

Identifying bottlenecks in manufacturing is usually pretty easy. On an assembly line, you can see when products pile up at a certain point. In business processes, however, they can often be harder to find.

Start with yourself. Is there a routine or situation that regularly causes stress in your day? These frustrations can actually be a significant indicator that a bottleneck may exist.

For example, imagine that you're responsible for reviewing a report that another team member creates each week. Once you're done, you give it to another team member, who has to post the report on your company's intranet. Due to your workload, however, the report often sits on your desk for hours - so the next person down the line sometimes has to stay later at the end of the day to post it on time. This causes a lot of stress for you as well as your colleague. In this scenario, you're the bottleneck.

Here are some other signs of bottlenecks:

• Long wait times - For example, your work is delayed because you're waiting for a product, a report, or more information. Or materials spend time waiting between steps of a business or manufacturing process.
  
• Backlogged work - There's too much work piled up at one end, and not enough at the other end.
  
• High stress levels.

Two groups of tools are useful in helping you identify bottlenecks:

1. Flow Charts:
Use a flow chart to help you identify where bottlenecks are occurring. Flow charts break down a system by detailing every step in the process in an easy-to-follow diagrammatic flow. Once you map out a process, it's much easier to see where there might be a problem. Sit down and identify each step that your process needs to take to function well.

For example, in the trucking scenario we mentioned earlier, a flow chart might look like this:

• Step 1 - Goods are manufactured at the factory.
  
• Step 2 - Goods are loaded onto the truck.
  
• Step 3 - The warehouse is notified about the truck's arrival time.
  
• Step 4 - The warehouse schedules a forklift for the expected arrival time.
  
• Step 5 - The truck arrives at the warehouse, and unloading starts.

Tip: Where bottlenecks seem to be occurring at interfaces between groups of people, Swim Lane Diagrams (members only) can help you map out the situation clearly. An alternative approach which explicitly brings time into the analysis is Value Stream Mapping.

In this case, the delay occurred because Steps 3 and 4 were missing, and this led to a long wait between Steps 2 and 5. Creating the flow chart before investigating the problem would have helped you quickly see where your process broke down.

2. The Five Whys Technique:
The Five Whys technique can also help you identify how to unblock your bottleneck.

To start, identify the problem you want to address. Then, working backward, ask yourself why this problem is occurring. Keep asking yourself "Why?" at each step, until you reach the root cause.

Consider our trucking example again. Go back to the beginning, and imagine that you have no idea why the trucks are delayed.

Trucks are forced to wait for hours at the warehouse.

Why?

Because the forklift isn't ready to unload the trucks when they arrive.

Why isn't the forklift ready?

Because there's only one forklift, and it's used for other things. The warehouse doesn't know the trucks are arriving, so the forklift isn't scheduled to unload cargo.

Why doesn't the warehouse know the trucks are coming?

Because no one has called to tell them.

Why has no one called the warehouse?

Because the team member whose job was to call the warehouse left months ago, and no one else was assigned to make the calls.

Tip: The "Five Whys" help you zero in on a problem quickly, but sometimes this is at the expense of a thorough analysis. For more complex problems, consider using Cause & Effect Analysis or Root Cause Analysis.

And there's the solution. You've identified the root cause: a missing team member. The easy fix is to delegate the task to someone else.

By working backward and identifying the root cause, you can clearly see what you need to change to fix the problem.

How to Unblock Bottlenecks

You have two options for unblocking your bottleneck:

1. Increase the efficiency of the bottleneck step.
2. Decrease input to the bottleneck step.

In our trucking example, the clear solution was to increase efficiency by notifying the warehouse. How you might increase efficiency in other situations will depend greatly on the nature of the process concerned, but here are some general ideas:

• Ensure that whatever is being fed into the bottleneck is free of defects. By doing this, you ensure that you're not wasting the valuable bottleneck resource by using it to process material that will later be discarded.
• Remove activities from the bottleneck process that could be done by other people or machinery.
• Assign the most productive team members and technology to the bottleneck process.
• Add capacity in the bottleneck process.

For more on how to increase the efficiency of processes, see our article on Kaizen: Gaining the Full Benefits of Continuous Improvement.

The other option, decreasing input, may sound silly at first. But if one part of a process has the potential to produce more output than you ultimately need (or can manage), it's an appropriate response. You may have a situation where you keep increasing the amount of work-in-progress inventory immediately after a step that's working too efficiently.

For example, speed cameras can "catch" a large number of drivers who exceed the speed limit. However, each speed violation has to be processed, and this incurs a cost. The cameras can catch far more drivers than the processing departments can handle. So, many cameras are programmed to identify only those drivers who go a certain amount over the speed limit, or to operate only at certain times of day or certain days of the week. As a result, the number of inputs to the system is reduced to the level that it can process.

Key Points

Bottlenecks can cause major problems for any company, and identifying their root causes is critical. Look for the typical signs of bottlenecks - such as backlogged work, waiting (by people, materials, or paperwork), and high stress relating to a task or process. To make sure you identify the root cause (and not just one of the effects), use a Flow Chart, the Five Whys technique, or one of the other techniques we've recommended.

Apply This to Your Life Are there bottlenecks in any of your processes at work? Do you produce things that sit in a colleague's inbox for hours or days before they're processed, or do things sit in your inbox for days because you're too busy? Think about this and, for each bottleneck situation, identify who - or what - the bottleneck is. Is it you, or someone else, or even an automatic process? Then determine if the process would flow better if inputs to the bottleneck step were reduced, or if efficiency were increased. That done, make changes appropriately!

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A Final Note from James

I hope you've enjoyed the new format to the newsletter! We're going to be working on this and evolving it over the next few issues, so if you've got any comments and suggestions, please let me know. I'd love to hear what you think!

What's more, I hope you enjoyed the problem solving article we featured in this newsletter. If you're looking to build your skills even further, we'd love to have you join us in the Career Excellence Club. In the next two weeks in the Club, we'll be hear more on Solving Tough Problems in our latest audio Book Insight, and we'll be learning how to plan small projects with our latest Bite-Sized Training lesson. Members have access to our full toolkit of more than 500 learning resources, and our Mind Tools trainers are on-hand to help you work on the skills that are most important to you.

Meanwhile, in our next newsletter, we'll be looking at managing geographically dispersed teams and, in our online quiz, we'll ask you "How Good Is Your Decision Making?"

Until then, have an excellent two weeks!

James Manktelow email us Mind Tools Essential Skills for an Excellent Career!

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