In a past podcast with the co-authors John G. Schleier, Jr. and James F. Cox III of the book Theory of Constraints Handbook, I asked them if you can really get this type of improvements.
Related Podcast and Transcriptions: Theory of Constraints Discussion
Joe: What takes place when you have these paradigm shifts? You’re saying we’ve got these management methods and to make these huge shifts you have to have a pretty significant shift in the way you do business to get improvements of 40, 50, 60 percent, don’t you?
John: You surely do.
Jim: Yes, on this project here that John was talking about, we actually constructed a current reality tree with the undesirable effects, clouds, future reality tree to determine the objections. We used the prerequisite tree and developed a full-scope solution using the TOC thinking process tool set. The environment could have been almost any environment, and a tool set would have worked equally well in those environments.
But using that tool set, we have developed a pretty comprehensive solution with the manager over that area and looked at the negative impact of some of the actions and their problems. But you’re exactly right; it is a paradigm shift in the way you think about the organization and the way you manage an organization. Many people look at that and probably walk away because their school education, their local background is a local optimum approach where they’re looking for those six line problems in industry and how do I solve this six line problem and they don’t realize their solution causes problems in marketing, or sales, and human resources or employee morale so they never realize that their own actions can be causing problems in other areas.
John: If you take the shift that you make in saying, “We’re not going to measure people to on-time task performance.” That sounds like a form of heresy to a lot of people. I mean it’s when one does that, one overlooks the fact of human, normal human behavior. People are part of the system, and when you look at the world that way, you can see that, “OK, if I tell people that I’m going to measure them to on?time task performance, and then they’re going to pad their estimates.”
Already this is starting to give me trouble, and when I tell them that I’m not going to measure them to on?time task performance then they’re willing to give me a 50 percent estimate, and then I can take the contingency that was previously scattered through all these individual estimates, and put it in a project buffer that I can use to help me track and protect the project. And we also recognize that if someone knows that they’re being tracked, and they happen to finish a task early, in a lot of cases they won’t report it as completed because… Well, then the next time around my manager will say, “Well last time you beat your estimate by 30 percent. So why can’t you take that much more out of this new estimate?'”
We try to get away from the tendency people have to sandbag and not report their work, so the project gets the advantage of early completions which we help by using the relay runner approach to moving work through the system. But it’s too bad, as Jim alluded to a minute ago, that we aren’t picking up on some of these things and incorporating them into our university curricula.
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