All in theory of constraints
Henry Camp has created a nice two-page summary of Theory of Constraints and made it available for all to use. I have grabbed a copy (with permission) and it is available from my website too.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry has a nice piece on TOC and how valuable it is. And he mentions that Jeff Bezos has all his Amazon executives read The Goal. What I'd love to see is an article that describes HOW a company like Amazon is using TOC within the business.
Is the goal of a for-profit company to "make more money, now and in the future"? I suppose it depends on how you define the terms.
I've come across several recent articles in the press from India that talk about Theory of Constraints and the application at a number of companies.
"Pride and Joy" by Alex Knight is a Theory of Constraints business novel about a hospital in chaos and a way of thinking that can help move beyond the chaos to a truly patient-centric, high quality environment.
Rather than describe the solution - a description that is always going to be lacking - understand what problem the customer is trying to solve. What limitation or barrier do they need to overcome? And why do they want to do that?
One of the many people I follow on Twitter, Richard Cushing, has been interviewed and the results posted as "Where Does Your ERP Selection Fit with Your Continuous Improvement Efforts?"
Yishai Ashlag's new book, TOC Thinking: Removing Constraints for Business Growth, is a good overview of the Theory of Constraints approach to thinking about running organizations.
A theme has emerged for me at TOCICO 2014 across many of the talks and discussion this year. We generate big changes in implementing Theory of Constraints in organizations. And those big changes by their very nature create conflicts. How should we respond to these conflicts?
As usual, I'm exhausted after four days of listening and thinking and talking about the Theory of Constraints. Today was loaded with shorter sessions and more interesting conversations.
I attended a number of talks on CCPM today at TOCICO, as that is work I am doing these days. And these weren't even all the material that was available on CCPM. There were also some great hallway conversations.
The TOCICO conference has shifted from longer talks and workshops to 30-minute updates and case studies. This gives me the excuse to summarize in one post, rather than a post for each session.
Rob Newbold of ProChain held a session, diving into one of the big themes of his book, The Project Manifesto. It was good listening to him talk about it, as I picked up some things I hadn't appreciated from reading the book alone.
The second day of the TOCICO conference opened with a great keynote from Kristen Cox on "Better, Faster, Cheaper State Government." What a great way to open the day - TOC and systematic thinking really can come to an environment like state government. And there are lessons for other implementations.
Jelena Fedurko presented an interesting way to help resolve organizational conflicts - conflicts between the desired actions of two parts of the organization, where each believes the other's actions will severely damage a common goal.
Avraham Mordoch presented the next iteration on his CCPM Maturity Model that I reported on from last year's conference.
Eli Schragenheim's workshop covered the history of TOC with a focus on the many paradigm shifts that Goldratt went through in development of TOC and related thinking.
The "four concepts of flow" come from a 2008 article that Eli Goldratt wrote that describe the innovations from Henry Ford and Taiichi Ohno that have inspired him to create Theory of Constraints.
How does Theory of Constraints apply to the healthcare situation? Very well. Alex Knight presented his long running work in healthcare as the opening keynote at the TOCICO 2014 conference.
Rob Newbold's latest book takes the reader further down into how to run projects (with CCPM). This book will be something to talk about with my colleagues and friends who are running these kinds of projects.