1. Reduce bottlenecks
2. Remove excessive reviews
3. Make your process parallel when possible
Businesses are complex systems that operate through interconnected processes. At a high level, there are three types of processes within any organization.
Primary processes are the core activities directly responsible for delivering a product or service. These are the steps that create value for the customer.
Support processes are the functions that enable primary processes to run effectively. While they don’t directly produce the final product or service, they play a critical role in keeping operations running smoothly.
Management processes focus on overseeing, guiding, and improving both primary and support processes. These include planning, monitoring performance, and ensuring goals are met.
Processes allow work to flow across departments, but they are influenced by many variables. Without proper design and oversight, these factors can quickly lead to inefficiencies and reduced effectiveness.
One of the most common issues within any process is a bottleneck. A bottleneck is a point where the process slows down or becomes constrained, limiting the overall flow.
Think about a TSA line at the airport. The process moves relatively smoothly—until everyone reaches the scanning machine. At that point, everything slows down because only one person can be scanned at a time, and the scan itself takes time. That single step controls the pace of the entire system. That’s a bottleneck.
However, bottlenecks aren’t always this obvious. They can take many different forms and impact a process by just a few seconds—or extend delays by days or even weeks.
I once worked with a company where a single department in their primary process became the bottleneck. The result? A massive backlog. One department was working 45+ hour weeks trying to keep up, while another had little to no work at all. This imbalance is a classic symptom of a bottleneck—work piles up before the constraint and starves the steps that come after it.
So, how do you reduce a bottleneck?
The honest answer is: it depends. It depends on the company, the process, and the overall goals. In many cases, the solution involves process reengineering—redistributing work, improving efficiency, or redesigning the flow entirely.
But what if you can’t remove or expand the bottleneck?
Going back to the TSA example, you can’t always make the scanning machines faster. Adding more machines and staff isn’t always practical or cost-effective, especially in lower-traffic airports.
In those cases, the focus shifts to optimizing everything around the bottleneck.
You maximize efficiency both before and after the constraint. For example, you streamline the steps leading up to the scanner so that it’s constantly in use. The goal is simple: the bottleneck should never be waiting on the process— the process should be waiting on the bottleneck.
When you reach that point, you know you’re operating at maximum efficiency given the constraint.
In business, reviews and quality checks are necessary—sometimes even required by law. But there’s a point where too many reviews start doing more harm than good.
When reviews are stacked on top of more reviews, they can severely reduce the efficiency of a process without actually improving quality. Instead of creating better outcomes, they create delays, frustration, and unnecessary complexity.
When we work with companies that have excessive reviews, the first question we ask is simple:
Why isn’t the task being done correctly the first time?
If you want to make a process more efficient, you should be asking yourself that same question. If your answer is, “I don’t know—it should be done correctly the first time,” then you’re not dealing with a process problem. You’re dealing with a deeper issue.
This is where many consulting companeis get it wrong. They look at the process, compare it to the company’s goals, and say, “Everything looks fine,” without digging deeper into what’s actually driving performance.
A well-designed process isn’t just about the steps—it’s about ensuring those steps are executed correctly the first time, so the system runs like a well-oiled machine.
Have you ever been home doing spring cleaning with the dishwasher running, the washer going, the dryer on—and you’re vacuuming at the same time? You’re getting multiple things done at once instead of waiting for one to finish before starting the next.
That’s called working in parallel, and it’s one of the most efficient ways to operate.
Working in parallel means two or more activities are happening simultaneously. In a business setting, this looks like multiple departments or employees working on different parts of a process at the same time, rather than waiting for each step to be completed in sequence.
Compare that to serial work, where everything happens one step after another. Serial processes are often slower because each step is dependent on the previous one finishing before the next can begin.
A simple, everyday example is cooking dinner. If you cook everything one step at a time—first the chicken, then the vegetables, then the rice—you could be in the kitchen for a long time. But if you cook in parallel—chicken in the oven, rice on the stove, vegetables being prepped at the same time—you get the entire meal done much faster.
Companies should almost always be looking for opportunities to shift from serial to parallel work. When done correctly, it reduces total lead time, increases output, and keeps everything moving efficiently.