| name | delivery-bottleneck-analysis |
| description | Diagnose persistent delivery bottlenecks from queue age, WIP, handoffs, dependencies, rework, specialist scarcity, approvals, and flow evidence before moving work or adding capacity. |
Delivery Bottleneck Analysis
Use when work repeatedly accumulates, misses expectations, or stalls at one stage, role, decision, or handoff.
Procedure
- Define the affected workstream and measure where age, backlog, blocked time, or missed commitments actually accumulate.
- Map the flow from intake to completion and identify queues, handoffs, approvals, specialist roles, dependencies, and rework loops.
- Distinguish temporary spikes from structural constraints using data across a representative period.
- Check whether the apparent bottleneck is caused upstream by poor intake, oversized work, missing decisions, defects, or batching.
- Identify the limiting resource or policy and estimate how it constrains throughput or lead time.
- Compare interventions such as reducing WIP, improving input quality, changing sequencing, removing approval friction, cross-training, automation, or adding specialist capacity.
- Avoid optimizing one stage in a way that simply moves the queue downstream.
- Implement the smallest promising intervention and measure whether the bottleneck and end-to-end flow actually improve.
Decision rules
- The busiest role is not always the bottleneck.
- Adding more work to a constrained system increases WIP, not throughput.
- Machine/resource bottlenecks belong to Fleet/Infrastructure when evidence shows runtime capacity is the constraint.
- Fix flow causes before institutionalizing manual expediting.
Quality gate
The analysis is complete when the actual constraint is evidence-backed, upstream and downstream effects are understood, the proposed intervention targets that constraint, and improvement will be judged by end-to-end flow rather than local activity.
