A recent article in the Wall Street Journal (The Reason Southwest Stopped Overbooking), which contained excerpts from an interview with Southwest Airlines’ CEO Gary Kelly, brought out the need to address airline capacity issues on the ground and in the air. Responding to a question on the impact of lack of infrastructure improvements, Gary made the following comment.
“In the air, it makes their trips longer and longer. A flight today from New York to Dallas is significantly longer for scheduled flight times than it was 20 years ago, and that’s true for city pairs across the U.S. When we experience these longer flight times, we change the schedule so that they’re no longer “delayed” according to the schedule, but now all you’ve done is you’ve built in the delay time into the schedule, and I just fear that as time goes by over the next generation that there’s a limit to how much you can simply increase the flight times before you just reach gridlock.”
One of the concepts of lean is that capacity constraints slow all work flowing through the system[i], [ii]. In product development, you see projects taking longer because key resources are overloaded. Therefore, the resources multitask causing the project work to take longer. Because the project work takes longer, the estimates for the next project incorporate those delays, making the next project even longer. You create a self-reinforcing cycle causing project durations to keep growing.
Reinforcing cycle leading to ever growing task durations
Lean product development provides methods to keep your projects moving as quickly as possible and avoid the expansion cycle, including the following.
Airlines have seen flight times increase in response to capacity issues. As companies try to schedule resources to 100% capacity, project durations also rise. Changing the way you manage the work can drive significant improvements in schedule durations and help prevent the reinforcing cycle from growing in your organization
[i] From The Principles of Product Development Flow, by Donald G. Reinertsen, Celeritas Publishing, 2009.
[ii] From Mastering Lean Product Development: A Practical, Event-Driven Process for Maximizing Speed, Profits, and Quality, by Ronald Mascitelli, Quality Books, Inc, 2011.
[iii] Tasks on the critical path or critical chain should have the highest priority.
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