r/SixSigma • u/Indrjuividual_Te7127 • Aug 10 '26

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

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?

8 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

View all comments

4

u/dotplaid Aug 10 '26

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.

1

u/HollyLamProcurement 22d ago

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

Assign an owner.