The bottleneck moved. The hiring plan didn’t.

Adding people to the wrong step doesn't raise output, and in service businesses it can quietly lower it. The tell is in the queues, not the timesheets.

By Steve 5 min read
Abstract bridge artwork for The bottleneck moved. The hiring plan didn’t.

A firm decides its delivery capacity is the problem. It hires two people into the team that always looks busiest. Six months later the wage bill is higher, everyone is still busy, and the number of jobs finished each month has barely moved. Lead times, if anything, are worse. This is one of the most reliably repeated patterns in operations, and it has a clean explanation. Throughput in any linked system is set by its binding constraint. Capacity added anywhere else does not become output: it becomes work-in-progress. And the…

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