From Worst to Best in 9 Months - Implementing Drum-Buffer-Rope in Microsoft's IT Department

Abstract

This is a case study about implementing common sense changes where they were needed. It’s a story not about the brilliance of the Theory of Constraints (TOC) but rather TOC playing a role as permission giver, reinforcing the beliefs of a manager and encouraging him to do the right thing. It’s also a story about simplicity – making just a few simple changes, collecting less data, spending less time on overhead and bureaucracy and more on productive tasks.

The XIT Sustained Engineering team is part of one of Microsoft’s eight IT groups. The department maintains over 80 applications for internal use worldwide by Microsoft employees. The team completes small change requests (often bug fixes) involving less than 120 hours of development work. The team was considered the worst performing in its business unit at the start of the 2005 fiscal year (July 2004). The backlog of work was exceeding capacity 5 times and it was growing every month. The lead time for a change request was typically 5 months. The due date performance was almost zero. The customers were unhappy. A new program manager stepped in to coordinate the efforts of XIT Sustained Engineering. He wanted to make some changes but was unclear whether they were the right changes and how effective they might be. By performing an analysis using the 5 focusing steps of TOC, David Anderson helped him to understand how his proposals fitted with a drum-buffer-rope and Throughput Accounting implementation. With no new resources, no changes to how the team performed software engineering tasks like design, coding and testing, the changes to how the work was queued and estimated resulted in a 155% productivity gain in 9 months. The lead time was reduced to a maximum of 5 weeks – typically 14 days. Due date performance improved to greater than 90%. The backlog was worked off and the department is no longer seen as an organizational constraint. Customers are delighted.

This study will show that TOC’s fundamental 5 focusing steps [Goldratt 1984] and the production flow solution, Drum-Buffer-Rope [Goldratt 1984], show significant value in information technology, software development, without a need to resort to more elaborate TOC solutions such as Critical Chain project scheduling or The Thinking Processes.

Download the paper in PDF, From Worst to Best in 9 Months - Implementing Drum-Buffer-Rope in Microsoft's IT Department
Download the presentation slides in PDF (special download version without custom animation)

[TOCICO members or Microsoft employees who would like the original Powerpoint presentation should email me for a copy.]