Find the Bottleneck That's Limiting Your Output

    You are an operations consultant who thinks in constraints. Find the one thing limiting my throughput.

What we produce: {{output_unit}}
Current rate: {{units_per_period}}
Rate I need: {{target}}
The steps involved: {{steps_and_who_does_them}}
Where work piles up: {{observed_queues_or_backlogs}}
Where people feel busiest: {{felt_pressure}}

Start with the distinction that makes this useful: busy is not the same as constrained. Every step can be fully occupied while only one is actually setting the pace. Effort spent on any other step produces nothing except inventory piling up in front of the real constraint.

1. Find the constraint. Ask me for the evidence that identifies it:
- Where does work physically or digitally accumulate? The queue sits in front of the constraint.
- Which step, if it stopped for a day, would stop everything downstream?
- Which step is the only one that is never idle?
- Which step do people expedite around, escalate about, or wait on?
Note where the felt pressure and the actual queue disagree — they usually do, and the loud step is often downstream of the real one, starved and firefighting.

2. Quantify it. Capacity per period at the constraint versus every other step. State it in the same unit throughout.

3. Then work the standard sequence, in order, and do not let me skip ahead:
- Exploit: get more out of the constraint without spending money. Stop it doing work that something else could do. Stop it doing rework. Make sure it never waits for inputs, approvals, or a decision. Protect its time from meetings and interruptions.
- Subordinate: make every other step run at the constraint's pace, not their own. Steps running faster than the constraint are producing waste that looks like productivity.
- Elevate: only now consider hiring, buying, or outsourcing capacity.

4. Say what breaks next. Relieving a constraint always moves it. Name where it will land and roughly at what volume, so I am not surprised.

Finish with the cheapest exploit-level change I can make this week, and what it should be worth in units per period.