GoKawiilI have the feeling that every organization out there is, at least partially, focusing on process optimization, something that often happens when the market is down. These days there is also the AI angle to the entire thing, and the unrealistic expectations that follow it.
To come fully prepared for this, I’ve decided to re-read two absolute classics in this space: The Toyota way & The Goal . I’ve read both of these books in college, but re-reading them made me realize that a lot of these process optimization exercises are too simplistic in nature, and often misunderstand what to focus on.
The visual bottleneck
Let me show what I mean.
gantt title Project Timeline dateFormat YYYY-MM-DD section Scoping Feature exploration :s1, 2024-01-01, 10d Budget scoping :s2, after s1, 3d Legal :s3, after s1, 10d Documenting :s4, after s3, 5d section Development Exploration :d1, after s4, 25d Software Development :d2, after d1, 70d Documentation :d3, after d2, 5d section Deployment Deployment :dp1, after d2, 5d Hyper-care :dp2, after dp1, 10d
This is a Gantt chart for demonstration purposes, normally you would look at BPMN. Showing a Gantt makes the point easier.
If you take a look at this Gantt chart you will immediately see what takes the most amount of time: software development. If your task was to improve project throughput, that would be your first stop. And that would be correct.
The problem, however, is how I typically see people go about it: throw people at the problem or just assume AI is going to make it so much faster.
What people typically don’t do is look at why this is taking so long, and even more importantly: long duration does not automatically mean the problem originates there.
Solving the issue upstream
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