Bottleneck

It was a Monday late morning and I was driving from Tidel Park to my office in mount Road.  The traffic was moderate and I was hoping to drive faster and reach my office before 11.00 am.  The reasons was I could just use my permission instead of half a day of leave. It was just 10.15 am in the morning and I was left with 45 minutes to reach my destination.

I took right turn near the Chennai cancer institute junction and hit the kotturpuram road. As you know, it’s a broader road with 3 lanes on both the sides and I was hoping to reach my office on time.

But, after few minutes, I found myself stuck in a huge traffic jam and realized that it was going to be pretty difficult this time. It was almost like a vehicles procession literally inching at snails’ pace. This turned out to be a kind of test for one’s patience, mental & physical endurance and driving skills. I literally had to change gears couple of times every minute.

By the time I reached the end of the road, it was almost 10.45 am. So instead of 5-10 minutes, it took almost 45 minutes. When I crossed the road and hit the kotturpuram bridge, there was no traffic at all.

So what was the problem in the kotturpuram road and what was choking the vehicles movement to cause such a huge traffic jam?

It was actually a road repair work (just before the bridge) that was going on and it narrowed down the road from 3 lane to almost a single lane and it caused a huge traffic congestion.  This turned out to be a bottle neck for all the vehicles passing through.

I am sure many of us would have come across a situation like this in a city like Chennai and you could very well relate to what I am talking about here.

Points to ponder

#Anything that affects the free flow of work is a bottleneck. Once you remove it, the problem gets addressed and normalcy is restored. In the above example, the road repair was a bottleneck that affected the free flow of traffic.

# We come across bottlenecks at workplaces. It can be in the production process, management, decision making etc., Bottlenecks are bad for the Business. It can kill your efficiency, motivation, competitiveness etc.,

# Identify and remove the bottlenecks: It’s important to identify and address them effectively and on time. In the above example, they could have done the road repair during the night time or during non-peak hours.

Example-1 – Bottlenecks in recruitment: If you are looking for a niche skill in the market that has a premium and you have kept your budget at a moderate level, the chances of identifying the right talent within the given time and at that cost is very less. Rather you can look for trainable talent instead of looking for all the skills and this can open up the talent pool.

Example-2 – Bottlenecks due to absenteeism: If you have seen higher absenteeism due to festivals, it’s better to anticipate absenteeism for critical projects during festival time. You can remove the bottleneck  by way of introducing any special attendance incentive or you can think of deploying the required no of resources from non-critical projects to your critical projects so the project delivery is not affected.

# Are you a bottle neck? When you are busy or are on leave, do you see that many approvals are pending or reviews are pending affective the performance of your team or function? If yes, no doubt, you are bottleneck and in that case, you need think of decentralizing your authority?

Example - in one of the manufacturing companies that I worked, we had a negotiation committee headed by the purchase dept head and his approval was a must to proceed. In one particular instance, when he was on leave for about 3 weeks, we could not place the purchase order for buying safety shoes and uniforms for the workmen though everything was negotiated and finalized by the committee.  The bottleneck was the approval process. 

Later, we redefined the approval process in such a way the approval authority was broken into various levels based on the cost of purchase.  This ensured to a very large extent that the approval can take place even in the absence of the negotiation committee head.

There can be lot more examples to add.

Have you come across any such bottleneck or have you yourself been a bottleneck to your team? Do share your experience.

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