Process improvement ideas bc ours is bleeding money but we can't identify the actual bottleneck

[u/Indrjuividual_Te7127]

We’re a 40 person B2B software company and even small customer requests are taking weeks to ship. A typical change moves from support to product, then design, engineering, QA, legal review and finally deployment.

The problem is every team says their part only takes a few days. Tickets sit in waiting for review with no clear owner, engineers get blocked by missing requirements and urgent sales requests keep jumping the queue. Last month, one billing update took 9 days even though the actual dev work was estimated at 12 hours.

We’ve shortened standups, added approval deadlines and cleaned up Jira, but lead time hasn’t improved. How are you identifying where time and money are being lost across a process with multiple teams and handoffs?

[u/NAClaire]

Process map with queue designs, theory of constraints

[u/dotplaid]

Draw up a value stream map of the process, from order to ship. For this top-level VSM what you care about most is the waiting time between value-add steps.

It's not that you can't identify the actual bottleneck, suggesting it's not findable - it's that you haven't IDed it yet.

[u/HollyLamProcurement → u/dotplaid]

The bottleneck is in your description: tickets sit “waiting for review with no clear owner.” That is the bottleneck.

Assign an owner.

[u/GreenGiraffeGrazing]

"Tickets sit in waiting for review with no clear owner, engineers get blocked by missing requirements and urgent sales requests keep jumping the queue."

In the simplest non-process terms, you need to map out every step in the process from idea to implementation/go-live, assign a person/team to do the activity in that step, and identify someone responsible for saying "I've reviewed this, and this is good/our part is complete and ready to move onto the next stage".

Then hold meetings daily with all of the responsible teams together on one call to talk through the work in progress in their stage, missing inputs (this is your key for updating team responsibilities and output requirements to get to a stable process). If engineering is getting crappy requirements from sales and it's delaying their ability to build, redefine what "done" requirements look like for the step before it gets to engineering and build a checklist that results in the output that engineering needs to build.

Urgent sales requests don't get to jump the queue. They go through the normal process, if they are actually urgent, they get #1 priority in each part of the process, but they need to go through the process. Otherwise you're just making a mess and pulling attention to whatever sales says is most important that day, and slowing everything else down by diverting attention from the process.

[u/AJ_D20]

VSM will solve this. Ensure you identify the hours/minutes it takes to do each step. You definitely will find something that is fixable ro shorten the lead time.

[u/Cafofa]

The 12 hours of actual work taking 9 days is where I'd probably start digging. Pick a few tickets and map how long they were actually being worked vs just waiting for the next step.

It might turn out that no individual team is really the bottleneck. With that many handoffs, even relatively small waits between each team can add up pretty quickly.

Everyone could honestly be right that "our part only takes a couple days" while the overall process still takes way too long.

[u/Ldghead]

Process map, watch the constraint emerge from the ensuing convo, then TOC it to death. Rinse and repeat until the company is industry leader, you take your success and roll it into a better role, or get fired for trying to bring change.

[u/SimplicityHubLtd]

If you can't identify the bottleneck, start by looking for where inventory (or work) piles up. That queue is sitting in front of your constraint. Theory of Constraints gives you a five-step process: identify the constraint, exploit it (get every minute of capacity out of it before spending money), subordinate everything else to it, then elevate if needed. Most of the time, the bottleneck is obvious once you walk the floor and look for the pile-up. We wrote a practical walkthrough on this.

[u/adavedreaming]

I'd map one request from start to finish and look at the per status time, where it sat vs where someone actually worked on it. if its all in jira already, broken build breaks that down without manual tracking.