Phoenix Project Ch. 20 23 - Hoangdinh85/NTI-310 GitHub Wiki

The "work" changed when the understanding of the work they do, changed. By seeing the work the perform as a manufacturing process, they saw how their constraint impacted throughput. The workflow changes they made included sheltering the constraint from unnecessary work and to ensuring the constraint was never idle. Soon, they noticed that the only way for them to clear the backlog of unfinished work-in-progress was to put a freeze on new work. One of the results of the changes they made was that as they began to get caught up to the work commitments, their attention began to turn towards the process by which they should resume normal work operations.

Within the organization's IT department, "work" was not viewed as a production process. It was viewed as a request that needed to be fulfilled. Generally the fulfillment was evaluated by individuals using the best-guesstimate approach. As a result this approach led to over-committing the resources of the IT staff. As the resources were over-committed, the quality of the work began to suffer and they failed the amount of fire-fighting increased. Eventually this became the cultural-norm. Crisis-management using the triage approach to what needs to be taken care of next.