theory-of-constraints

name

theory-of-constraints

description

Apply the Theory of Constraints (Goldratt's Five Focusing Steps) to find and fix the single bottleneck that caps a process, workflow, pipeline, or Agent Skill/plugin's throughput. Use whenever optimizing speed, lead time, cost, or token/context budget of a system — CI/build pipelines, dev value streams (idea→review→merge→ship), an Agent Skill's trigger/context flow, or runtime code paths — ESPECIALLY when you don't know where to optimize, a local speedup didn't improve the whole, work piles up at a stage, everything is busy but little ships, adding capacity didn't help, or a policy/rule (not a resource) is the limiter. It locates the constraint with measurement, then prescribes exploit → subordinate → elevate → repeat, and stops you optimizing non-constraints (the "mirage of the non-bottleneck"). Trigger even when the user just says "speed this up", "why is this slow", or "make this more efficient" without mentioning constraints or bottlenecks.

Theory of Constraints

A diagnostic runbook for optimizing any process — a CI/build pipeline, a dev value stream, an Agent Skill or plugin, or a runtime code path — through Eliyahu Goldratt's Theory of Constraints (ToC).

The one idea that makes ToC powerful: every system has exactly one binding constraint at a time, and global throughput rises only when you improve that constraint. Effort spent anywhere else produces nothing — "an hour saved at a non-bottleneck is a mirage." This runbook finds the constraint with measurement, then walks the Five Focusing Steps to relieve it without creating new problems.

When to Apply

Use this skill when the user wants to optimize a process or workflow and any of these are true:

• They want to optimize but don't know where to start ("make this faster", "why is this slow", "reduce the cost of this").
• A local speedup didn't move the end-to-end result (you optimized the wrong thing).
• Work, queues, or WIP pile up at one stage while others sit idle.
• Everything looks (high utilization, low throughput).