Management usually had a fairly straightforward explanation. They were short of people, particularly in some critical positions, and needed more capacity to get things moving properly. Sometimes that turned out to be exactly right, but I wasn't going to recommend recruitment just because everybody looked exhausted.
First, I wanted to understand what all that activity was actually producing.
Where does the time go?
Let's say I am visiting a service company where the technical department is constantly overloaded. Sales complains that quotations take too long, Operations cannot get specialists when they need them, and Finance is waiting for technical confirmations before issuing invoices.
It certainly looks like a capacity problem. But before accepting that explanation, I want to follow a few actual jobs through the operation. Who receives the enquiry? What information comes with it? Who works on it, where does it wait, and what happens when somebody is unavailable or an approval is required?
I am particularly interested in the difference between the time somebody spends actually working on something and the time that something spends moving through the company. I am on the hunt for non-value-adding time. A mouthful, that is.
Suppose a quotation takes seven working days to reach the customer, but the actual work involved amounts to three hours. Where did the rest of those seven days go?
Perhaps it was waiting for missing information, a specialist, an approval, and finally for somebody to notice that the approval had arrived. Or perhaps the technical work genuinely requires several days, and the company really does need more capacity.
I don't know yet. That's why I am asking.
The queue nobody seems to see
Unfinished work doesn't always look like unfinished work. In a factory, you can often see material waiting between operations regardless how “just-in-time” production is. In an office, the same thing may be hiding in email inboxes, spreadsheets, folders marked For Approval, or the heads of people who have promised to get back to somebody.
I have seen organizations where practically everything had to pass through one particular manager. Each request seemed reasonable enough. Somebody needed five minutes to clarify a technical point, somebody else wanted an approval, and a third person had a customer waiting for an answer. Unfortunately, thirty people needing five minutes from the same person creates a rather different situation.
And the manager is supposed to do their own work between all those interruptions.
Now I am wondering whether this is a capacity problem, an authority problem, a competence gap or simply an arrangement that has developed over the years without anybody questioning it.
I also wonder what happens when that manager goes on holiday. In countries where people take five weeks of annual leave, a key person disappearing for several weeks can create some interesting situations. "He's on summer holiday" may be a perfectly understandable explanation locally, especially when half the country is away at the same time. Customers elsewhere, accustomed to taking only extended weekends, may be somewhat less understanding.
If an organization cannot function properly when one person is absent for any reason, I suspect there is something more interesting to investigate than that person's holiday arrangements.
What else is consuming the capacity?
Perhaps Sales regularly submits incomplete information, leaving technical specialists to chase details that should have been collected earlier. Perhaps team leaders could make decisions themselves, but nobody has formally given them the authority.
Or perhaps the company has invested in clumsy systems, replaced them with newer systems that don't quite work as intended, and laid off the departmental assistants to save costs. Now highly paid managers spend a day every week trying to remember how to prepare their own expense and travel reports.
The salary savings look good on paper. I wonder what happened to the actual cost of getting the client work done.
And then there are the people doing the work. They often know exactly where things get stuck, but they are so occupied dealing with today's emergencies that they have little opportunity to examine why those emergencies keep happening.
It's rather like running alongside a bicycle, pushing it faster and faster, until you're going too fast to jump on and enjoy the easier ride.
My task is to understand what is happening across the operation, not simply accept the first explanation or find somebody to blame.
What should we stop doing?
At some point I start asking questions that can be rather uncomfortable. Why is this report prepared? Who uses it? Why does this decision need approval from somebody three levels up? Why are three people checking the same information?
Some controls are essential, particularly where safety, quality, money or legal responsibilities are involved. Removing them just because they take time could be a very expensive improvement.
But I have also seen procedures that survived long after the problems they were designed to prevent had disappeared. Nobody particularly wanted them, but nobody had questioned them either.
Businesses accumulate these things rather like I accumulate useful bits and pieces in my workbench drawers. I might need them one day, although finding the particular item I want is another matter. The difference is that my workshop drawer doesn't require three signatures and a weekly progress meeting.
Sometimes the most useful capacity improvement comes from removing work that should not be there in the first place.
But will the business actually improve?
Now suppose we manage to reduce quotation turnaround from seven days to two. Sales is delighted, customers are happier, and management has a success story.
Before celebrating too enthusiastically, I want to know what happens next. If faster quotations produce more orders, can Operations deliver them? Are the same technical specialists needed for project execution? Have we released capacity or simply moved the queue somewhere else?
I have seen departments performing beautifully against their own targets while the company as a whole struggled. Everybody has good figures to show at the management meeting, but the customer is still waiting.
That's why I am interested in what happens to the entire operation, not just the department where the problem first became visible.
And while following the main problem, I try not to overlook the smaller discoveries. A missing field on a form, an informal workaround, or an unnecessary approval may not explain everything, but together they can sometimes release a surprising amount of capacity.
I also return to things I initially set aside. Something that looked unimportant on the first morning may look quite different once I understand how the work actually moves through the business.
So, do we need more people?
Perhaps we do. But by now I should be able to distinguish genuine capacity shortages from capacity consumed by waiting, rework, unnecessary administration, poor decisions and badly arranged responsibilities.
Then we can make a sensible choice. What should change, who can make it happen, and what improvement should we expect? More importantly, how will we know whether the business is actually performing better?
I am not interested in producing a beautiful process diagram that everybody admires before returning to the same old way of working. I want the people involved to understand what needs to change and be able to make those changes work.
The real question was never whether everybody was busy. We could see that the moment we walked in.
The question is how much of all that effort is actually producing the results the business needs, and what is preventing the rest from doing so.
That's the difference between trying to make people work harder and making the business work better.
And it's a distinction worth understanding before spending money on more people, more systems or another improvement programme.
If this sounds familiar in your business, perhaps we should have a conversation. You can find me at www.baleteworks.com.
Rooted knowledge. Real improvement.