Once you have found the resource that sets your delivery speed, the obvious move is to get more of it. The obvious move is right, and the way almost every organisation executes it is wrong, because the only person qualified to train the new hire is the constraint itself. Capacity goes down before it goes up. Here is how deep that dip goes, how long it lasts, and why hiring into a crisis guarantees you pay the whole cost and collect none of the benefit.
Read the article →Every portfolio has a largest batch, and in most organisations it is not a project. It is the annual plan: a single event that commits twelve months of your scarcest capacity at the moment you know least, and then holds that commitment through the entire period in which better information arrives. The cost is not the budget cycle itself, it is the coupling of three decisions that have three different natural cadences.
Read the article →Your delivery organisation has a constraint, and you have probably gone looking for it. Downstream of it sits a second one that appears on no capacity plan: the number of changes your business can actually absorb in a year. When delivery outruns absorption, the extra output is not throughput, it is inventory, and it ages, decays, and lowers the capacity that would have cleared it.
Read the article →Drag cost tells you what a week of lateness is costing today. It is a rate, and putting it on a report alone assumes the cost of delay accrues in a straight line. Across most portfolios it does not: some value sits behind a cliff, some behind a step, and some is being taken by a competitor while you wait. Here are the four shapes, and the half-million-pound sequencing decision that flips when you know which one you are holding.
Read the article →Every commitment your portfolio makes rests on a capacity number, and that number is usually wrong by close to half. The gap is not random: unplanned operational demand concentrates on your constraint by construction, lands entirely on project work, and gets misdiagnosed as poor estimating year after year. Here is how to find the hours your plan counts and your constraint does not have.
Read the article →No one ever decides to make a project bigger. It happens one reasonable request at a time, each too small to argue with, until a three-month project has become a six-month one. Scope has a ratchet: requirements go in almost frictionlessly and almost never come out, so the total only ever climbs. Each addition is a project that skipped the queue, dodged the pricing, and was approved by no one.
Read the article →Expediting a project feels free: you move it up a list, you add no work, so it looks like you spend nothing. In a constrained portfolio the cost is real and it lands entirely on the work the urgent job jumped, every project behind it pays for the interruption. Unless the expedited job is genuinely the costliest per week, 'drop everything' has just destroyed value. Here is how to price the queue-jump before you order it.
Read the article →The most common thing a project does with its life is wait for someone with authority to decide something. That wait sits on no plan, consumes no capacity, and appears on no report, which is exactly why it goes unmanaged. Treat your steering board as the constrained resource it is, and the queue in front of it turns out to be one of the most expensive things in your portfolio.
Read the article →There is a team in your organisation that has just got faster, and it has made no difference to anything you deliver. That is not bad luck, it is arithmetic: an improvement made anywhere other than the constraint produces no extra throughput, and an improvement made upstream of it usually makes delivery worse. Here is where your improvement budget should have gone instead.
Read the article →Somewhere in your portfolio is a piece of work that has been finished more than once. We call it iteration, refinement, another pass. A large part of it is rework, and in a constrained portfolio it is far more expensive than the hours to do it again: it spends your scarcest resource twice, its cost escalates with how late you catch the error, and it re-enters the queue as new work in progress that slows everything else. Worse, the conditions that cause it are the ones it makes worse.
Read the article →Once you have found the resource that sets your delivery speed, the obvious move is to get more of it. The obvious move is right, and the way almost every organisation executes it is wrong, because the only person qualified to train the new hire is the constraint itself. Capacity goes down before it goes up. Here is how deep that dip goes, how long it lasts, and why hiring into a crisis guarantees you pay the whole cost and collect none of the benefit.
Read the article →Every portfolio has a largest batch, and in most organisations it is not a project. It is the annual plan: a single event that commits twelve months of your scarcest capacity at the moment you know least, and then holds that commitment through the entire period in which better information arrives. The cost is not the budget cycle itself, it is the coupling of three decisions that have three different natural cadences.
Read the article →Your delivery organisation has a constraint, and you have probably gone looking for it. Downstream of it sits a second one that appears on no capacity plan: the number of changes your business can actually absorb in a year. When delivery outruns absorption, the extra output is not throughput, it is inventory, and it ages, decays, and lowers the capacity that would have cleared it.
Read the article →Drag cost tells you what a week of lateness is costing today. It is a rate, and putting it on a report alone assumes the cost of delay accrues in a straight line. Across most portfolios it does not: some value sits behind a cliff, some behind a step, and some is being taken by a competitor while you wait. Here are the four shapes, and the half-million-pound sequencing decision that flips when you know which one you are holding.
Read the article →Every commitment your portfolio makes rests on a capacity number, and that number is usually wrong by close to half. The gap is not random: unplanned operational demand concentrates on your constraint by construction, lands entirely on project work, and gets misdiagnosed as poor estimating year after year. Here is how to find the hours your plan counts and your constraint does not have.
Read the article →No one ever decides to make a project bigger. It happens one reasonable request at a time, each too small to argue with, until a three-month project has become a six-month one. Scope has a ratchet: requirements go in almost frictionlessly and almost never come out, so the total only ever climbs. Each addition is a project that skipped the queue, dodged the pricing, and was approved by no one.
Read the article →Expediting a project feels free: you move it up a list, you add no work, so it looks like you spend nothing. In a constrained portfolio the cost is real and it lands entirely on the work the urgent job jumped, every project behind it pays for the interruption. Unless the expedited job is genuinely the costliest per week, 'drop everything' has just destroyed value. Here is how to price the queue-jump before you order it.
Read the article →The most common thing a project does with its life is wait for someone with authority to decide something. That wait sits on no plan, consumes no capacity, and appears on no report, which is exactly why it goes unmanaged. Treat your steering board as the constrained resource it is, and the queue in front of it turns out to be one of the most expensive things in your portfolio.
Read the article →There is a team in your organisation that has just got faster, and it has made no difference to anything you deliver. That is not bad luck, it is arithmetic: an improvement made anywhere other than the constraint produces no extra throughput, and an improvement made upstream of it usually makes delivery worse. Here is where your improvement budget should have gone instead.
Read the article →Somewhere in your portfolio is a piece of work that has been finished more than once. We call it iteration, refinement, another pass. A large part of it is rework, and in a constrained portfolio it is far more expensive than the hours to do it again: it spends your scarcest resource twice, its cost escalates with how late you catch the error, and it re-enters the queue as new work in progress that slows everything else. Worse, the conditions that cause it are the ones it makes worse.
Read the article →