This Focused Performance Weblog is a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective. TOC is noted for its applications in Project Management and Multi-Project Management (Critical Chain) and Operations Management (Drum-Buffer-Rope), as well as in Marketing, Strategic Planning and Change Management (TOC Thinking Processes). If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Monday, June 30, 2003
Life Cycle of a Silver Bullet -- A parable by Sarah Sheard of the Software Development Consortium pointing out various fallacies of blindly following the latest big idea, including...
"Only by really looking at your company's problems can you solve them. Other people's strategies worked for them because the strategies were made for them. If you want to make real improvements, you have to do the work of determining your business problems and applying methods that make sense to fix them."
The idea of benchmarking such efforts is not new to readers of this weblog or of other pages of this site.
As Sheard points out, as processes and approaches are copied over and over again, they lose fidelity to the original, just as a copy of a copy of a copy does on paper. As the clarity of paper copies suffer, the potency of approaches suffer, especially when attempts are made to match it to the inevitable different starting points. There is no such thing as a canned solution -- each situation searching for improvement must take a clean look at where they are at, and determine for themselves the constraint that limits their performance, the culture that perpetuates it, and how to use the available tools and techniques to create a new solution for themselves.
Otherwise, such efforts will be limited to crippled attempts at catch-up to those who have gone before.
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