Project Management: What Is a Bottleneck?
While carrying out a project, there are always contingencies that could jeopardize its progress. The production chain might suffer a disruption, or even a complete halt, because of an unexpected surge in workload. This is what’s known as a bottleneck. It usually shows up as an obstacle that slows down the workflow. It can lead to delays in delivering the product or completing the project. To prevent it, or to deal with it effectively, it’s important to understand it better. Note that a bottleneck often isn’t spotted until after it has already appeared.
What Is a Bottleneck?
This obstacle occurs when production requires more work than the team has the capacity to handle. A bottleneck is, within a production chain, the link that gets assigned more work than it can actually process.
A bottleneck can show up in several forms or elements, namely:
- A person
- A tool or a computer
- A department
- An entire work stage.
How to Spot It
It can appear in different areas of a project, namely:
- In Lean Management, where a bottleneck is often linked to poor resource management
- In quality management, when a bottleneck compromises the quality standard
- In project management, showing up as an obstacle that affects deadlines, budgets, and the quality of deliverables.
Three steps help you spot a bottleneck in time:
- Visualization, by properly tracking work with a Kanban board. This tool helps present tasks and gives a clearer view of task pile-up. It’s the most telling sign of a bottleneck.
- Mapping pending tasks against the activities shown on the Kanban board. If the queue is fairly large and growing very quickly, a bottleneck is likely the cause of the problem.
- Assessing cycle time for each situation. A diagram showing a heat map of cycle times gives you a clear view of how much longer a cycle is taking than usual.
What Steps Should You Take?
To resolve a bottleneck issue, there are 4 steps to follow, involving thorough, methodical analysis:
- The first step is to identify the obstacle. A shortage of materials or a malfunctioning tool are examples of obstacles that can disrupt an activity or a project.
- The second step is analyzing and understanding the nature of the bottleneck
- The next step is to look for resolution strategies
- The final step involves preventing any future bottlenecks from occurring.
Once a bottleneck has been identified, steps must be taken to fix it. Here are the reflexes to adopt when one appears.
- Keep the activity going. Even if you notice a bottleneck, it’s recommended to keep the affected area running
- Maintain quality. When a bottleneck occurs, don’t sacrifice quality by trying to speed up the process. Doing so could increase costs and delays when repairing the damage
- Set limits on the amount of ongoing work. If the work-in-progress limit is too high in areas experiencing bottlenecks, it needs to be reduced.
- Work in batches. In the event of a bottleneck, work in batches, especially for tasks that are fairly similar. This saves time. However, be careful with batch size, as overly large batches carry their own risks
- Allocate more resources and expand the team. You can assign more people to an area affected by a bottleneck. It’s also recommended to allocate more resources in this case. That said, be careful, as this could create other bottlenecks if not managed properly.
