The Goal by Eli M. Goldratt (2014)

​The Amazon best selling book,  The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement (2014) by Eliyahu (Eli) M. Goldratt  tells a story about a plant that has all of the followings:

• Leading Edge Technology
• Good People Keeping the Hard work
• All Materials Needed
• A Market Needing the Products

​However, it still losing money! With the notice of closing the plant in 3 months if there is no improvement, the plant manager Alex Rogo sought help from his physics teacher Jonah to make changes for improvements ... 

The book tells a great a story on how we can optimize the manufacture and management process. In this blog, I  will summarize some of the main concepts from the book and discuss how some of the ideas that we can use in IT management and data integration product design. 
The book tells us that a well-thought strategy did help to a great extent. ​
1. Making Money is the Ultimate Goal
Making money is the ultimate goal for every business. Therefore, all the work should lead to positive contributions to company's bottom line. However, because the nature of your work is different, the way we describe the goal and tracking the progress will also be different.  For example, corporate finance describes the goal with the Return on Investment (ROI), Net Profit and Cash Flow, while manufacture department describes the goal using the Throughput, Inventory, and  Operational Expense. Finding the right description ensures the best way to achieve the goal. 

2. Eliminate the Bottlenecks 
To achieve the goal, you need to improve the efficiency. To improve efficiency, you have to have the whole picture in mind. For example, you have to know the dependencies between any process, product or project. Th author tells us that the most inefficient part determines the overall efficiency.

Dr. Goldratt, in his book, explains the Theory of Constraints with a"Boy Scout Hiking" story. How fast the troop can hike together is determined by the boy who walks the slowest. We call this the "bottleneck." Therefore, to be efficient, you have to identify the bottlenecks and improve their productivity. During the Boy Scouts hiking, the team offloaded the backpack from the boy who walks the slowest so that he could walk faster. In the manufacturing process, for example,  Alex, the plant manager,  moved QA process before the bottleneck process to avoid processing unnecessary items. 

3. Stop and Think First 
In the story, the gotcha moment is when Alex Rogo, the plant manager, stepped out of the regular corporate meeting, bought a pack of beer and a pizza, and sat on the hill to think what happened and what the goal was for his plant. It's the moment when he started to change the fate of his plant after is his boss, Bill Peach, told him that if he couldn't make any change, the plant would be closed in three months. 

To many IT people, every day is filled with customer tickets, new projects, meetings, and the routine tasks such as backing up and upgrading the systems. The busy schedule prevents us from thinking what the real goal is. Therefore, take a cup of coffee, sit down and think for a moment is precious.  It's great to think about the goal, what we have to do to achieve the goal, and evaluate how productive

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