Intensive workshop · Leadership
The time work spends waiting
Measuring how much of a cycle is work and how much is queue, so the constraint is found where it sits rather than where the complaints are loudest.
- Duration
- 3 hours 30 min
- Delivery
- On site · Virtual
- Participants
- From 6 to 18 participants
- Investment
- Request a quote
Investment depends on scope, number of participants and delivery mode. We prepare a proposal at no obligation.
The problem it solves
When a delivery runs late, the question asked in the meeting is who fell behind. It is the wrong question, and it survives because it is the only one that can be answered without data.
Follow a single order, case file or request from the moment it arrives until it leaves, noting the time at each change of hands, and something appears that almost nobody expects: for most of its life the work is not being worked on. It is waiting. Waiting for an approval, waiting for somebody to finish something else, waiting for a figure requested by email, waiting for Monday, when someone will open the folder. Total effort is small next to total elapsed time.
This is why the intuitive fixes fail. More speed is demanded from a team already running flat out, someone is hired into the area that complains loudest, capacity is bought where there was spare capacity already. The point that limits the operation is rarely the noisiest or the most visible one. It is the point in front of which work piles up, and it is found by looking at the queue rather than at the people.
What it covers
This is a measurement workshop, not an opinion workshop. Each participating company picks one bounded flow, an order, a case file, a request or a collection cycle, and follows it end to end with a method simple enough to sustain without systems: mark when the work changes hands and when it stops.
Those timings separate two quantities that are normally confused: the time someone is actually working on the item and the time the item is waiting. Comparing the two usually dismantles the explanation the organisation had been using, and that is the part of the session that generates the most argument, because somebody in the room was usually right without being able to prove it.
The final part separates three things that get treated alike and are not: a genuine capacity constraint, a queue produced by how work is prioritised, and a wait caused by an external dependency. Each is addressed differently, and confusing them is how companies hire staff for a sequencing problem. No generic solutions are handed out. You leave with the constraint identified, measured, and the next measurement on the calendar.
What participants learn
- Follow a real flow and record handoff times without installing anything.
- Separate working time from waiting time inside a single cycle.
- Identify the point in front of which work accumulates.
- Tell a capacity constraint apart from a priority queue and from an external wait.
- Define a recurring measurement that shows whether the intervention worked.
Agenda
- Cycle time, working time and waiting time: three different measures
- How to follow a real case without installing anything and without stopping the operation
- Handoffs: where work changes hands and starts waiting
- Where work accumulates, and why it accumulates there
- Capacity constraint, priority queue and external dependency
- Why the area that complains most is rarely the one that constrains
- Variability: the same process that takes two days sometimes and ten other times
- What to measure after intervening, and how often
What the organisation leaves with
- A timing map of a real flow in your company, with waiting and working time separated.
- The constraint on that flow, identified with the measurement that supports it.
- A written classification of each delay: capacity, priority or external dependency.
- A recurring measurement plan with an owner, a frequency and the next reading date.
Programme details
- Format
- Intensive workshop
- Also available as
- Workshop · Executive talk
- Languages
- Español · English
- Includes
- Participant workbook
- Action plan
- Post-training resources
- Facilitation
- ALUD Consulting LLC — Global Business Transformation.
Who it is for
- Operations and service managers answerable for delivery times
- Owners who added staff and saw no improvement in delivery
- Supervisors of administrative areas carrying a backlog of open cases
- Leadership teams arguing about delays without cycle data
Frequently asked questions
- Do we need a system that records times?
- No. The method works with paper and a clock across a sample of real cases. A system helps once you know what to measure, and deciding that is exactly what this session is for.
- Do we leave with the bottleneck solved?
- You leave with it identified and measured, not solved. Opening a constraint usually requires decisions about investment, staffing or sequencing that are taken outside the room and with information that does not fit in one session.
- Does this work for a service operation with no physical production?
- Yes, and that is usually where it shows up most. In administrative and service work the queue is invisible because it lives in inboxes and folders, so nobody watches it grow until a client complains.
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Read more →Having information is not the same as being able to decide
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Read more →Request this programme
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Working this inside the organisation
If this challenge will not be settled in one session, ALUD Consulting LLC works it as consulting: management consulting, human resources, strategy, organisational design, leadership development and business transformation.