Stuck in the neck of the bottle. Bottlenecks. What are the most common bottlenecks in organisations that are not pure production lines with a surprising excess demand for product?

Do you want to say resourcing? For example, overloading a team beyond capacity to process all the work? Tempting, but think again. Bottlenecks are decision makers; the resourcing issue is a symptom not a cause.

Let’s do some root cause analysis. More than likely there were early warning signs of a team about to reach their overload threshold. The bottleneck arose because a decision wasn’t made timeously, allowing the situation to escalate to the point of being classified as a bottleneck.

What, it happened without warning? That means the right monitoring was not in place. And I’ll bet you ten bucks someone, somewhere considered better monitoring and parked the idea because it was too hard for now. Parking decisions like these is like narrowing the neck on the bottle. Sooner or later, the neck will become too tight and restrictions on flow will occur.

Why was the decision parked? Because of a lack of focus on KPIs. Again, the state of KPIs had been talked about, but …. Parked!

Why was improving KPIs parked? Because of an absence of a data culture. Why, because the data is poor, in too many diverse systems to get the right data in one place, or, the data does not exist. And here is the biggest parking of an issue I have seen across a majority of organisations – leaders park the decision to truly improve data and become an organisation that has a true data culture.

You can’t afford to do that in 2024!

If you are a C-Suite Leader, you know better data will improve almost every aspect of your business. If you are a Risk Leader, you know you need to get onto KRIs and quantification of risk.

Please, please, please get the car out of park and start!

Did this resonate with you? I’d love to hear your thoughts.