Olivia Reynolds, CEO, and chief architect of Quantum Innovations, sat rigidly, her back straight against the hard wooden chair of her favourite coffee shop as she watched her best friend, Susan Benson, take yet another important phone call. Olivia had never really thought of herself as the jealous type, and she usually managed to be happy and encouraging towards all her friends. However, these last few months she was finding it more and more difficult to plan and predict the completion of all her architectural design projects, and it had become a huge stress factor in her life. It felt like, one moment, everything was going great and the next, everything that could go wrong had gone wrong, and nothing was completed when and as planned.
In fact, this coffee date with her best friend was meant to be a venting session where she could unload everything that she had kept close to her heart for the past year. The tinkling of the half-rusted bell above the door brought Olivia out of her thoughts as Susan, who was pocketing her phone, rushed back to their table.
“Sorry about that! We’ve got five wedding orders this season and it’s been hectic!”
Olivia smiled in response, even as a wave of jealousy reared its head. A florist, Olivia thought to herself. A florist is doing better than me. She was often bombarded with large orders as the wedding season hit her particularly strong. Yet, she never once wavered, finding the time to complete all her orders on time with no difficulty. Are there even that many flowers actually in bloom all year round? Meanwhile, the frequent design overloads, that all the varied architectural projects created, would often set Olivia’s company back days, if not weeks, almost guaranteeing a client compliant. In some cases, the problems resulted in the loss of a valued client, or the incurring of extra costs to appease an upset client.
Olivia immediately shook her head to get rid of the thoughts plaguing her mind. This was Susan, her best friend who had been by her side since she was seven, her maid of honour at her wedding to Susan’s brother, Mark. Susan, who had seen her worst days and her best nights. It wasn’t fair.
“Are you all right, Livvy?” Susan prompted.
“Yes, just feeling a bit tired, that’s all.”
Olivia didn’t know why she lied. Sharing her work troubles and asking for advice seemed easier when she was younger and inexperienced. The more she grew alongside her company, the harder it became to confide in others. Any minute now, she was sure the investors of her company would barge into the rustic coffee shop and condemn her for spending precious office hours catching up with her best friend, never mind that it was a Saturday, and she hadn’t seen Susan in person for months.
“Not very convincing, Livvy.” Susan paused; her brows furrowed. “Is it something about Quantum Innovations?”
Olivia took in a sharp breath. Her mind was split in two, as it had been for the past two months. Should she confide in her best friend or keep their discussion the furthest thing from work?
“We are struggling to keep on top of our deadlines for almost all our projects, and this means even the ones we haven’t even started yet are at risk! It would’ve been fine if it was a one-off event, but it is nearly all my projects. The issue has gotten so bad that we have started losing money each month and the losses look set to continue. I am under pressure from the board to grow the business, but now the clients are noticing and getting upset about my unpredictable lead times, and in some cases, we haven’t even started, and the designs are due. Even the investors the board represents are getting jumpy. I’m scared that I’m only a hair’s breadth away having to turn customers away and downsize the business. That would be the beginning of the end for us.” Olivia’s eyes went wide as her mouth poured out her fears.
Well, that’s one way to bring it up. Olivia thought to herself, smiling wryly at Susan whose own eyes mirrored her expression as she stared at her friend in shock.
“Are you serious?”
“No, Susan, I decided it would be a fun start to our Saturdays to joke about losing my life’s work.”
Olivia immediately regretted her sarcasm as Susan’s lips thinned into a straight line and she looked away, taking a sip of her hot chocolate, watching the people passing by through the window. Olivia watched her for a minute, before sighing.
“Sorry, Susan. It’s just… there’s been a lot. I don’t know what changed, really.” Olivia started, thinking it was best to be honest and rip it off like a Band-Aid. “It was much easier when I was working from my parents’ garage, designing people’s dream houses and bringing their vision to life.”
Olivia smiled, the first genuine smile to touch her lips in what felt like a long time, before it faded again.
“Things are different now…, maybe this wasn’t the right career path for me after all.”
It’s not the first time Olivia’s had this thought.
“That’s bullshit and you know it!” Not expecting such a fierce response, Olivia looked up from the mug of coffee cupped between her hands at Susan. Her lips were still in a straight line which told Olivia she should be careful of her words if she didn’t want a fight on her hands.
“Huh?” Was all that managed to come out of Olivia’s mouth.
“You’re born to be an architect! It’s literally been your only dream since I’ve known you! Look at how far you’ve come already, from using a LEGO set to build my dream home to actually building it for me three years ago! You’re the Olivia Reynolds of Quantum Innovations! There’s nothing in this world you can’t build!”
The vote of confidence from her best friend gave Olivia a small boost, though she didn’t think she deserved it. Susan sighed, reaching across the table to cup the backs of Olivia’s palms which were still around the coffee mug.
“How about you tell me what’s been going on?”
“Well, Jared called me an overbearing witch before rage-quitting yesterday. How’s that for a start?” Olivia looked away, feeling bitter again.
“He complained that people were manipulating the priority sequence for assigned tasks, where some were using artificial due dates for their own benefits. These manipulations resulted in the team being extremely busy with work, yet little is actually getting completed, and it feels like we are running around like headless chickens, unable to progress on any of our ongoing build schedules. With all the other stuff I have to handle personally, I haven’t really been able to focus on it and get the team rallied around a resolution. I suppose this was what finally broke the camel’s back.” Olivia explained, feeling exhausted just thinking about it.
“Really? Jared? As in the nerd who had a massive crush on you and who took a three-week break from work when you finally got engaged to Mark? That Jared?” Olivia let out a small smile at the playful look Susan shot her, not being able to stifle a chuckle.
“Yeah, that Jared. So, you can imagine how bad it is considering he didn’t quit when I finally tied the knot.”
Susan’s gaze seemed to soften as she looked at Olivia. Olivia tried not to flinch at the calculating gaze her friend was shooting her. Susan had a competitive streak and didn’t really want Susan to think any less of her, especially when Susan’s own flower arrangement business had been taking off. Susan not only owned a small flower shop across the street from them, but she also frequently experimented with her flowers to create new and interesting species. Her clients loved her and paid handsomely for her purple roses (Susan’s favourite creation yet). Surely an architect should be doing better than a florist.
Not only did Olivia feel challenged in handling her team well, but she also felt stuck. Whatever she did it seemed to go bad. She had tried sequencing jobs in promised due date order only to find that the output dropped. She had tried sequencing the jobs in an efficient order, but then she started missing more promised delivery dates, and had to authorise overtime to catch up.
To make matters worse, the system she had set up to monitor and assign tasks was currently overloaded by the sheer number of jobs that needed to be completed ASAP. And, she simply did not have the time to look into it, so had resorted to assigning tasks verbally.
Olivia looked away from her friend, feeling ashamed that her thoughts had begun to grow increasingly panicked as the work stress caught up to her.
“I don’t know how you do it!” Olivia couldn’t help but exclaim. “We started the same way, no matter how different our fields are. My two friends and I in my parent’s garage, with you and your brothers experimenting in your parent’s basement.”
Susan smiled at the memory, though she looked sad as she kept her gaze on Olivia.
“I can’t help thinking it was easier with just the three of us even though we barely got any projects back then.”
Susan didn’t bother saying anything until Olivia was done with her venting. Isn’t this what Olivia finally reached out to her friend for anyway? She needed to scream it out and then she could go right back to her office with a clearer head and fight to keep her business from being run into the ground.
“Susan, it’s like this, the more projects we got the bigger my company became. I now have over a hundred employees, yet somehow, we keep getting blocked in the design execution stages, and work is backing up. Some projects sit for a long time in my people’s to-do queues with something more urgent frequently reprioritising the queues. Every time we close a new design project, we end up with our people being interrupted to set up for this latest project. We have capacity, but it is never where we need it. So more often than not, we end up just… replanning. Susan, what was a well-oiled machine now seems to be in complete chaos. You really should visit the office someday, it’s like we’re all practising for a high-stakes cross-country race someone signed us up for without our knowledge!”
Susan smiled again at that, reminded of the time she signed Olivia up for a track competition at their high school without her knowledge.
“Many of our customers are complaining about our lead times, and we lost three projects just last week to a competitor. The way things are going, I really can’t see Quantum Innovations still being here five years from now. So many of our projects are delayed and nobody is able to predict the completion of work.
Tell me Susan, what client would be OK with, ‘Hey guys, sorry, I have no idea when your dream home will be done, so continue living wherever you’re stranded in until we are ready’?”
Susan hummed, nodding her head slightly in agreement, which didn’t really do anything to soothe Olivia’s frayed nerves.
“Is there anything specific that’s causing all these delays?” Susan enquired.
“It’s the increased sales. As far as I know, our services have not changed, but now our ability to deliver on time has deserted us. It’s our prioritisation, the jobs we release do not complete in the order we want, and we seem to be constantly replanning to ‘almost meet’ our commitments.”
Susan nodded, her eyes revealing her recognition of this problem as something she too had experienced.
“Your lead times have blown out, haven’t they!”
“Yeah, tell me about it,” Olivia replied, feeling defeated. “This has caused massive delays in all our projects which was the main reason I’m losing a lot of my clients. You never would’ve guessed what was causing all the delays!”
“What, what?” Susan was almost jumping out of her chair, eager to know what big revelations Olivia would drop on her.
“Remember how I said Jared was upset because people were manipulating the dates?”
Susan nodded, waiting patiently for Olivia to go on.
“Well, apparently some team members who were working on some of our interesting future building projects, were assigning priorities to these projects that caused them to jump through people’s to-do queues, sometimes gazumping designs that were close to their due dates. I don’t know what they were thinking or why they thought this was a smart idea, but it can destroy the current completion plans. Not only that but we are finding it’s also customers who change their dates causing a frantic reshuffle of priorities. It is creating chaos, yet when I talk to my people, I frequently find a lot of idle time. It doesn’t add up right, and it’s so frustrating.”
Olivia took a deep breath, trying to calm down and gather her thoughts as she pulled her hands away from Susan and the now-lukewarm coffee sitting in front of her.
“This is something I never expected to face and it’s turning me into a person I don’t recognise… sometimes I think I should just give up. Downsize, sell the company, and use the money to think of a backup plan, I don’t know!” She finished in a whisper, finally drawing a reaction from Susan.
Susan barely suppressed laughter upset Oliva. She certainly was not expecting Susan to laugh at her. It was now Olivia’s turn to press her lips together in a tight line as she tried her best not to yell at her friend.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” She waved her hands placatingly. “But if you think you’re ever leaving architecture behind, then yeah, you’re living in a different reality. It is you calling, you won’t be able to leave. What would your backup plan even be? Another architectural service?”
That… was not entirely wrong. Olivia smiled up at Susan, before sighing and leaning back on her chair.
“Mark told me a little bit about what you’ve been going through but I thought I’d let you get there yourself. Believe it or not, I went through the same problems last year when my business was really starting to take off. I thought we had a good system in place, but my brothers were accepting every order to capitalise on our capability, or so they said. It left us unable to complete several orders and a lot of our customers were ready to give up on us. Heck, some even did! I almost quit on the spot, leaving it all to my brothers so I could work an office job like my parents wanted.”
“No way! You?!” Olivia glanced at the bright orange dress that Susan was wearing, her sleeves puffed out and her sunhat resting on the table next to her cup of hot chocolate. “You are not made to be stuffed into an office cubicle, Susie!”
Susan laughed, nodding her head.
“I’d probably get fired within a week.” She grinned, making Olivia laugh but agree. More than likely, Susan would dream up and start unauthorised experiments after a week and get fired, then happily run back to her shop, her lifeblood, just like how Quantum Innovations was Olivia’s lifeblood. Olivia sighed, her smile slipping off her face yet again.
“How’d you do it?”
“I made a schedule.”
Olivia gave her a look, making Susan’s grin stretch wider.
“But we are already doing that. You’re not telling me something.”
“I’m not joking! It worked!”
“All right, I’ll bite. What was on this schedule?”
“I took a look at our daily tasks, the things we had to do on a day-to-day basis to get the results I wanted and put them down in due date order, which for us is our customer promise dates. From creating the Darth Vader Begonia and delivering a batch of it to Aunty Patrice, everything had a strict due date sequence. If I missed a single due date, I’d be back where I was when my brothers took on more orders than we could manage. I needed to make sure that everything was delivered within our lead time and that meant not slowing the flow.”
“Susan, there is something else. We already do that. We know our customer due dates, and we write our plans with that forefront of mind.” Olivia wondered if Susan actually had something useful to share. After all, a florist operation is different from an architectural design operation.
“Olivia, remember how we used to conspire together and run experiments to find our flow constraint?”
“Sure do. Those were fun times.” Olivia was listening attentively, not bothering to ask Susan what the hell a Darth Vader Begonia was.
“Well, therein lies the secret. You need to be a steady rhythm in the operations which is hard to achieve without focusing on the constraint output. We realised that our schedules were too complex and had too many uncertainties. What made the difference was when we said, ‘What will the constraint produce today,’ and then scheduled it to make it so. It was something our people could follow so they were not spending their time working on next week’s orders while I was trying to clear today’s deliveries. This way, I wasn’t yelling orders at everyone at the shop and constantly looking over their shoulders to make sure they were doing what they were supposed to and that we spent less time planning and more time executing my plans.”
Olivia couldn’t help but agree with Susan’s ideas. It had the ring of truth to it.
Olivia reflected, ‘My people, like Jared, are far from incompetent, each a genius in their own right. But we were trying to schedule everyone, and just isn’t working. If we schedule the constraint, then that will lock in the flow again. I like it. But I’ll have to lock down these moving due dates and limit the number of concurrent projects, otherwise, we won’t produce the right designs at the right time.
Susan added, “It’s also important to decide which tasks cannot be compromised on and must be prioritised and which can be safely started later. Urgency is only encouraged and reserved for the most important tasks, and this should be reflected in the constraint schedule you issue.”
“Consider this.” Susan continued. “While experimenting with Petunias might be on my high priority list, for example, Robbie’s highest priority is making sure the deliveries of the flowers go smoothly and Tony’s job is arranging the flowers according to the client’s preference. At the end of the day, fulfilling client orders on time is the most important task of all and the rest of the tasks should be sequenced so that all lead to this end goal, and as we found together with those constraint experiments, having the right jobs processing through the constraint at the right time is the secret. With me so far?”
Olivia nodded slowly, understanding what Susan was trying to say.
“I think I get it. This way, each person is in charge of ensuring the right jobs reach the constraint in the right order?”
Susan smiled encouragingly. “Yes, exactly. We can still help each other when needed of course, but this way, every process doesn’t feel like a race against time and your resources are focused too.”
Olivia sighed. “I think I could use some of that. I have had to pull some all-nighters to have something semi-decent to share with clients booked in for the next morning, only for it to be reworked again by the client since I missed aspects of the brief due to the rush. It is frustrating!”
Susan nodded. “You need to make sure that the stated due dates are meaningful at the constraint so that the right jobs arrive for delivery, which in my case is the local courier pickup.”
After a pause, Susan continued. “Another thing you can do is ask your employees to make educated guesses about the resource loading of your projects and the impact of having multi of these projects being progressed simultaneously. We had to limit the concurrency of our bigger orders because we started seeing non-constraint resource bottlenecks occurring, and those would spiral into schedule disruptions. When I did this the chaos calmed down a lot.”
Olivia nodded again, thinking fast. “The key thing to achieve is making sure the operational priorities and flow are stable,” she said slowly. “Going back to delivering to the clients being the main priority, this alludes to the sequence of tasks that need to be completed, and how well they flow at the constraint. That should mean we find the designs are complete roughly in the same order as we intended.”
“Oh, that would make a difference,” exclaimed Olivia.
She looked up at Susan, her eyes shining as brightly as they did when she first told Susan that she was starting her own company. “Oh my gosh, Susan… Thank you, I can hardly believe it. I need an efficient constraint Schedule that doesn’t create temporary overloads and for which the due dates are reliable! Clearly, that is what we need at this stage, so everybody is on the same page. Why didn’t I think of this, it seems so simple! You’re a genius!”
“Hmm, I do have my moments, don’t I?” Olivia was too overwhelmed by the sudden endless possibilities stretching out in front of her to comment on the smug smile on her friend’s face. She needed to get started on this constraint scheduling change ASAP!
She looked up as she felt Susan’s hands give hers a supportive squeeze. “You’ve got this,” said Susan, which reminded her that she needed to show Susan just how much she appreciated her best friend, who was currently smirking at her with an eyebrow lifted high on her forehead.
“Hey, want to come over later?” Olivia asked. “We’ll have a proper catch-up session and raid Mark’s chocolate stash!”
“Thought you’d never ask!” Susan giggled.
Olivia knew her struggles were far from over and that it would be a long journey, but she was sure of her direction and confident her employees would like the changes that she would be implementing for both their and the company’s benefit. Maybe, even Jared could be enticed back. For the first time in what felt like forever, Olivia had a clear mission that would leave her in control. She could see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.