I will start by defining what types of problems there are. We can define them based what we know or don't know about them, made famous by Donald Rumsfeld. Another way is to divide the class into chaos, complex, complicated and simple. We can also group them into material and non-material problems. For our purpose, it is the same whether we face a material or non-material problem, be it making a product or developing a disruptive new technology. Finally, we can reduce all problems to a matter of scarcity: we want to increase the amount of material or product we have, or to increase our knowledge to answer the five Ws and one H (who, what, where, when, why and how).
We can represent our current state with a pipeline, with inputs on the left and outputs on the right. To maximise our solution we need to get to most out of our inputs, to get peak flow of outputs. How we perceive our problem determines our solution and whether we achieve our goals. The closer our model is to reality, and the more efficient and effective it is, the better our chances of success. So what is out there?
The latest improvement wave is Agile, with the most popular incarnation being SCRUM. While it could be applied in theory in any circumstance, it is heavily represented in the IT industry and replaced the waterfall planning that existed prior. But it has struggled with scaling beyond the project teams that code.
In the manufacturing industries, there was Toyota Production System, which spawn many versions as there are companies. In the US this was grouped under the umbrella of "Lean", perhaps to emphasise the removal of waste. When I worked for Caterpillar it was known as Caterpillar Production System or CPS. I joined in mid 2000s when it was transitioning from pure 6 Sigma to CPS, which included both 6 Sigma and Lean. 6 Sigma was originally from Motorola to address their PCBA defect levels, and was popularised by Jack Welch at GE. As a 6 Sigma Black Belt it was a combination of Total Quality Management (TQM), Statistics, and Project Management.
Do they work? It depends. If you were a large company it would work better, simply because you had more waste to reduce. After some time though it would be harder and harder to find viable projects, and the improvement teams would be either doing something else or be somewhere else. I watched this happen in Caterpillar, where CPS at its peak was headed by a divisional vice-president, and then unceremoniously deleted off the organizational chart.
If you ran a small and medium sized enterprise, you will find it difficult to justify the costs and disruption involved in embarking on such a project. You may try apply some parts of the solution like visual management and kaizen, but if you are on the wrong path, it just means your organization dies slower: wasting more of everyone's time before the inevitable.
Fortunately, there is a improvement framework that doesn't suffer any of the issues that plague other improvement methodologies. And it can be applied to all companies regardless of size, existing methodologies, whether you are running operations or projects, and budget available. It was called in 1987 The Theory of Constraints, and today you can find proponents such as Steve Tendon of Tameflow (c) and Wolfram Muller of DolphinUniverse (c) in the web.
There are many more but I focus on these two experts because they actually build a proper methodology around the framework. You can read all the books by Eliyahu Goldratt (I have) but it will be difficult to get more than a few pithy statements of truth like the Five Focusing Steps from the book The Goal. I cannot remember how I chanced across Steve Tendon in a podcast explaining Tameflow (c), but what I heard explained all the issues I faced running projects for decades. I bought his book, jointed authored by both Steve and Wolfram, and essentially struck gold. And if that was not good enough, Wolfram shares his Dolphin methodology online as well.
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