If you want a bit more material to look at bottlenecks then here we are:
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Love him or hate him, one thing that Elon Musk understands is bottlenecks. It’s a common pattern in all his businesses - the focus on efficiency. Elon runs his companies on first principles style thinking. That’s why Tesla can build cars more efficiently than its competitors and why SpaceX can put payloads into space more efficiently than any other organization. The way these businesses are able to out compete their competition is by making sure there is nothing in infra-structure they cannot optimize. Elon runs his businesses in a manner that he has much tighter control over all the processes that are core. |
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It’s easy as a manager to look at a system and find things which look like they are broken or could be improved. The problem is if you are not tapping into the knowledge of the people in the system who are closest to it, you may end up identifying things which you think are bottlenecks but actually aren’t the real bottlenecks. This is when time and money get wasted fixing problems which don’t improve the system. You have to be humble as a manager and get people to trust you to have open conversations to find the real bottlenecks with your people. This is so important. |
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Bottleneck theory works for human processes and software. There are symmetries here. Simple clear language is a huge advantage for an organization. Avoid unnecessary specialized jargon. Create space to focus on the problems that matter. Bottleneck ideas can be applied in every area of an organization. Smart is simple. | ||
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When you look at system with the goal of trying to improve the speed and output, the first thing you need to do is try to look for what the biggest ‘bottlenecks’ are. Think of the problem abstractly in terms of components of the process. Let’s say they are A, B and C. If we look at the break down of time spent on these things maybe it breaks down as:
Total time is 100 minutes. As a manager or a software developer if we focus our efforts on making A or B twice as fast we won’t see a measurable improvement - increasing the speed of B by a factor of ten times only will barely produce a 1% increase in speed. But if we focus our efforts on making C change from 94 to 47 minutes then the figures will change to this:
Total time is 53 minutes. If we further optimize C to take it down to 5 minutes then the figures stack up like this:
Total time is 11 minutes. What is interesting about this process is that as you solve one bottleneck then usually another bottleneck emerges as significant. At this point optimizing A would now offer some opportunities to make measurable improvements in the process. |
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