Improve Workflows by Managing Bottlenecks

Understand whether process or resource constraints are stalling work.

- Samina Karim, Chi-Hyon Lee, and Manuela N. Hoehn-Weiss

BOTTLENECKS ARE A COMMON source of frustration in organizations. A company’s legal review process may delay the execution of high-value contracts, or a shortage of computing resources may slow progress on a new digital initiative. Such constraints can cause tasks to pile up and hinder teams’ abilities to move forward with their work, costing companies time and money. When leaders encounter a bottleneck, they may dedicate resources to addressing it only to find that the process in question is still stalled by other bottlenecks. Our research has found that organizational bottlenecks can be best managed or avoided not by addressing them piecemeal but by taking a holistic view of work systems and resource portfolios and aligning them in ways that improve organizational performance.

Bottlenecks manifest as tasks that are stalled for one of two reasons: because they depend on the output of other tasks that have not been completed, or because the resources required to complete the task are not available. Task bottlenecks frequently occur as teams wait for approvals from legal or compliance departments, for example. Resource bottlenecks happen when there is a lack of resources necessary to complete a task or process — say, if a construction project has only one crane available and there are competing demands to use the crane.

Task bottlenecks may emerge when more time is needed to complete the activity than has been budgeted, even if all necessary resources are available. While resource bottlenecks can be solved by investing in more resources, task bottlenecks cannot necessarily be solved by simply throwing more resources at the problem. Let’s explore the nuances of these two forms of bottlenecks.

Task Bottlenecks: Centralization and Complexity

Task bottlenecks are dependent on two factors in a work system: centralization and complexity.