Unblocking the Flow: Strategies for Identifying and Eliminating Workflow Bottlenecks
You’re cruising along, but cutting it close on your deadline, and then suddenly, deliverables are getting hung up and not making it to the next phase – most likely, you’ve hit a bottleneck in the process, and it’s always at the worst time. In the dynamic landscape of consulting projects, the smooth flow of workflows is critical for success. Identifying and eliminating bottlenecks is an essential skill for consultants. This article explores common bottlenecks, strategies for identification, analysis, and presents real-world case studies that illustrate successful resolutions.
Common Bottlenecks
We consultants often run into bottlenecks that crush project progress. These can include communication delays, unclear roles and responsibilities, resource constraints, and inefficient approval processes – in my experience, it usually falls into the inefficient approval process or resource constraints areas.
So the question is...
How do you identify these bottlenecks before they become an issue?
Bottleneck Identification
As a consultant, if you’re leading a project, you need to know who all the players are that have a role, no matter how small it is. Knowing who these folks are is step 1 in bottleneck mitigation.
Early on in the project, you can typically tell who the potential bottlenecks are going to be – its usually those folks who are the sole person in their department, they’re overtaxed and spread across a litany of different things. And believe it or not, whatever project you’re running probably isn’t their primary and sole focus in life, so you’re needs have already taken a back seat from the start. This is definitely a resource bottleneck.
Okay, so what if you didn’t identify the bottleneck until it actually presented itself and became an issue? You’re going to need to do a little root cause analysis to figure out what the problem is.
Root Cause Analysis
Root cause analysis is crucial for understanding the underlying issues causing bottlenecks. It involves digging deeper to find the core problem.
Story Time...
For example, I once worked a proposal where we went into final production, but half of the documents weren’t ready yet because they were still in editing and desktop publishing. This set us back almost a day, and our deadline to submit was already rapidly approaching. Talk about freaking out and cursing up a storm.
What happened? I spoke to the editor and desktop publisher to figure out what the issue was, and it turned out that instead of getting the documents incrementally over a period of time as they became ready, they got 300 pages dumbed in their virtual lap at the 11th hour. HA, major issue, and totally understand why this bottleneck happened. Scheduling, deadlines, and expectations.
Problem Solving
In that situation, since the bottleneck had already occurred, and we were running out of time, the solution was going to be expensive because we had to bring in more resources to get the documents ready for production. In a more organized planet in the multi-verse, the issue would have identified and mitigated before it even became a problem. But... it is what it is...
90% of the time (for me at least), bottlenecks can be resolved at the start of any project by doing these 2 things:
1. Constant communication with everyone involved in the project
2. Detailed scheduling – get those calendar invites going, so people know whats expected of them and when. Also, hold people accountable, this is no joke, and escalate things if they start becoming an issue.
With constant communication and detailed scheduling, you’re involving the entire team, taking in feedback from all parties, and adapting to changes but also avoiding potential bottlenecks.
Technology Solutions
One method for accomplishing this is by leveraging technology that can streamline processes and eliminate bottlenecks. Implementation of project management tools like Trello or Asana, can help project members stay on pace, while communication solutions like Teams, Slack, or Zoom to some extent can facilitate constant communication and feedback that feed into the success of the project.
Conclusion
So what did we learn? Don’t manage projects, right? Just kidding. Major bottlenecks are usually caused by time and resource constraints, and by being able to identify those up-front, keeping in constant communication with all team members (daily status meetings/scrums, etc…) and implementing a detail schedule, you should be able to jump on the express lane and bypass that bottleneck.