Today I had one of those little pieces of good news that make life worth living. The XIT Sustained Engineering team - the subject of my TOCICO case study - hit zero backlog of change requests. For those who viewed the slides or read the paper, you'll realize that no pending work means that they'd depleted the rope (both the buffer and the WIP). They had turned around an upward trending backlog of more than 80 with a lead time upwardly trending beyond 155 days. After 12 months, it is now a zero backlog and a lead time under 14 days. Congratulations guys! Outstanding job!

Yes, folks - that means we paid people to be idle today.

But not tomorrow - some new work arrived. Phew!

Imagine the panic. Like a bell tolling through the ranks of management. Zero backlog! No work. People are idle! People are idle? Correct! Yes! They have nothing to do! And we are paying them for this? Yes! What?

At this point management could do two things,

(a) the dumb thing - let's cut back on headcount, clearly we have too many people in there. We can save money. Reduce costs.
(b) the right thing - so, we've fixed that problem let's go after the next one, there is so much to do. Maybe by pushing more work through this SE team, we can fix some problem somewhere else? Onward! Let's not let inertia or hubris get in the way.

When your constraint moves out into the market, look inward for the answer to bring it back inside. A constraint in the market is a good problem to have! It's an opportunity.

[What a great little post-conference footnote to end this month. Happy Thanksgiving!]