Seven principles of efficiency you can try for yourself
Almost every decision that clogs up an organization runs into one of them.
These are not opinions: they are regularities measured and repeated for decades. Each one is explained in two sentences and comes with a small simulation. Play with it, change a variable and see what happens to the result.
The seven
- Pareto principle
A minority of requests (or causes, customers or defects) accounts for most of the impact. Handling those few first pays off far more than spreading the effort evenly, as long as the impact really is concentrated.
- Little’s law
In a stable system, the time an item takes to get through is the work in progress divided by the throughput. If capacity does not change, starting more things does not get more done: it only makes each one take longer.
- Utilization curve (Kingman)
When a team works close to 100% of its capacity, the wait for whatever reaches it does not grow in a straight line: it shoots up. Variability in requests and in the work multiplies the effect.
- Theory of Constraints
The throughput of a chain is set by its slowest link. An hour gained outside the bottleneck adds nothing; an hour lost at the bottleneck is lost for the whole system.
- Brooks’s law
Adding people to a late project makes it later. Newcomers take time to become productive, take time away from the people who train them, and every extra person multiplies the coordination channels.
- Conway’s law
Organizations design systems that copy their communication structures. How teams are split ends up deciding the dependencies between them, and with them the lead time.
- Goodhart’s law
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The harder an indicator is pushed, the further it drifts from what it was meant to measure.
Bring it to your organization
In my workshops and diagnoses we work on these principles over your team’s real flow of work, with your data rather than the simulation’s. See services or write to me.