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.
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
POOGI II -- Heath Row at Fast Company Now, picked up on my earlier post regarding TOC's Five Focusing Steps, commenting...
"Rooted in manufacturing, it seems to be a solid way to approach working around any limitation or lack of resources."
Rooted in manufacturing...Yes, to the extent that the concept was first applied in manufacturing environments. Goldratt's classic book, The Goal, is a novelized tale of such a manufacturing implementation. But TOC is more than just bottlenecks and buffers. It's really a means of managing systems, their performance, and growth, by managing their constraints.
These constraints don't have to be resource-based; they're often really found in erroneous policies and practices that end up mismanaging existing resources. And those policies and practices could be anything from how projects are launched in an IT or R&D shop, product pricing based more on questionable cost analyses than on value to customers, trying to manage quantities rather than flow in distribution systems, and over-emphasizing cost cutting to the detriment of top-line growth.
Each of the above examples is related to TOC-based starting point solutions in various common business functions. In addition to these "applications," the TOC toolkit also includes a set of logical "Thinking Processes" that I like to think of as practical "systems thinking" diagrams to help understand and communicate the various cause-and-effect relationships that lead from things like the aforementation erroneous policies and assumptions to problems faced in (complex) organizational systems.
Some of the non-manufacturing applications and the early introduction to the Thinking Processes can be found in Goldratt's sequel to The Goal, a book entitled It's Not Luck. Another good intro to the range of TOC is Deming and Goldratt, by Cohen and Lepore.
(By the way, the appropriate means of "exploiting" a "policy constraint" is to eliminate/replace it, which is facilited by the analysis and buy-in communication that the Thinking Processes were designed to provide.)
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