Key Points

• TOC focuses on identifying and addressing pain points in a given workflow.
• Proper use of TOC addresses and streamlines constraints, resulting in higher employee morale.
• Identifying a constraint is the most important step in any TOC effort.

The Theory of Constraints can lead to some great breakthroughs in your product design, but you have to understand the concept. Theory of Constraints is a management philosophy that supposes any workflow is going to have at least one pain point present. By addressing the pain point, you’re increasing the chances of overall success at any organization.

The same applies to product design as well, instead of simply process improvement. Understanding the five focusing steps and how to apply those to your product design is going to go a long way. Don’t fret if you’re lost on how to do so; that’s the point of today’s piece. We’ll walk through how each one of the focusing steps applies to your design and how to leverage it for the best possible results.

Identifying the Constraint

The first step to any work utilizing TOC is going to center on identifying your potential pain points, bottlenecks, or constraints. Product design is a far different beast than the likes of process improvement, but you can readily take a look at some of the issues that might plague your current design workflow.

As the most important step in any TOC effort, identifying the constraint is best done by reviewing the numbers and interviewing your teams. Talking to the designers, analysts, engineers, and everyone else involved in the design process is going to cast a far greater light on where they feel work hits a snag.

Further, you can take this to the mat with a closer look at the data. You’ll have a keen understanding of how long it takes to go from concept to production, where your teams hesitate, and whether or not the products or services you’re designing are even addressing customer needs.

Analyzing Workflows

Another valuable tool at your disposal is going to be process mapping. Take the entire product design process in use, and go through it step-by-step, taking the time to map out the flow and sequence of events. You’ll often find that certain stages are more prone to work accumulation than others, or you might even locate where workflow itself breaks down without some sort of intervening hand.

Exploit the Constraint

After identifying, you’re ready for the next step to supercharge your product development workflow. Exploiting the constraint isn’t quite what you might think at first glance. You’re looking at how to maximize the output of your current constraint without a significant investment of time, resources, or funds.

Essentially, you’re wanting your current workflow to work at full capacity. There are a few ways to achieve this with any product development work. You can maximize the flow of information, making sure teams have the right sort of documentation ahead of time before the project even starts.

Additionally, minimizing the chances of interruptions is a great way to keep your team on task. There is no shortage of distractions, side work, and other little tasks that occur in the daily operation of any business. Keeping these little tasks at bay for your team to focus is one way to keep them fully on task.

Standardizing and Streamlining

One of the most powerful tools at your disposal is standardizing the work. This helps to streamline the creation of any new product, thanks in part to usable templates, checklists, or automated processes to aid teams. While it might not completely overcome the constraint, you can be sure your team is ready to fire on all cylinders.

Subordinate Everything Else to the Constraint

All other aspects of your workflow at this point should be aligned with the constraint. In product development, this can seem rather counterintuitive, but there is a purpose behind it. The idea behind this step is to make sure your constraint has everything it needs. Any pain point is the result of poor planning and implementation, and making sure the constraint isn’t receiving too much work and ample resources can allow you to realistically address it.

A keen example of this would be the synchronization of teams. Your design and engineering teams might be knocking out prototypes left, right, and center. However, your testing team might not be able to properly address the prototypes they’re receiving. This might be due to a lack of documentation, as this can be key to managing or using any potential product.

Allowing the teams to sync up and take their time is going to reduce the friction on the constraint. Instead, it allows the work to proceed as needed and greases the axle for the next step.

Buffer Management

Making small buffers so the constraint is never left idle can be a great way of maximizing utilization. However, you’ll want to be careful with this sort of work, as it can bog down the backlog in no time flat. Making sure the constraint is being utilized is fine, and the use of buffers will help. Just make sure you take the time to reduce the potential for waste.

Elevate the Constraint

At this point, your constraint should be yielding better results. Ideally, this might result in more viable prototypes, a faster development workflow, or even a refined user experience. If it hasn’t, then it might be time to elevate the constraint. Previously, we discussed not making any significant investments. Elevating a constraint supposes that you’ve exhausted every possible resource and alternative to get to where you are now.

As such, it might be time for a little something extra to better handle your product development workflow. This might come in the form of extra training to give your team extra skills. It might come about in the form of policy reform at your organization. Some teams even rely on outsourcing to leverage the expertise and opinions of outside teams to make a significant leap forward.

No matter what you’re planning to do, it’s time to make a change.

Making the Right Investments

Take some time to analyze where the money, time, and resources might be best spent. It can be tempting to invest heavily in new technologies and tools to make things “better”. That said, you run the risk of those tools ending up with quite a learning curve and some significant delays while you try to get your team up to speed.

Repeat the Process

After you’ve elevated a constraint, it is no longer the weakest part of your workflow. So, you go back through the other pain points of your product development workflow and start all over again. Eventually, you will find another weak point, that’s just part of doing business.

While TOC is primarily used for process improvement, you can see its power in driving outside thinking on how we approach things like innovation. By removing the bottlenecks in your development workflow, you’re giving your organization a definitive edge over the competition. Further, you’re improving your team’s morale, which is worth its weight in gold when you consider who’s doing the work in the first place.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

Looking for something else to go with the morning scroll? You might want to take a closer look at some of the key metrics you’ll want to pay attention to with any TQM project. While TQM might seem long in the tooth, it is one of the most powerful means of approaching quality and process improvement you’ll find.

Additionally, you might want to unlock the power behind predictive analytics in your next Six Sigma project. While none of us can tell the future, the technology behind any sort of predictive modeling can show what might be next.

Conclusion

Theory of Constraints is a fantastic way to encourage more creative and innovative thinking for your product development workflows. There aren’t shortcuts with TOC, but you’re giving yourself quite a bit of flexibility when making use of the five focusing steps. The right application of TOC can see your teams soaring to greater heights and delivering upon the quality your customers expect.