Has this ever happened to you? A project is running late, the customer is getting increasingly annoyed, and there doesn’t seem to be a reason for all the chaos?
There are two outcomes to this very common problem:
- It gets explained away as a “bottleneck,” and no one takes further action. This usually leads to a future bottleneck.
- Your team takes a closer look, identifies the issue in the business process that caused the bottleneck, and fixes it. This gets fixed, and it never happens again.
Unfortunately, outcome #1 is common, and outcome #2 is rare.
It’s not that your team is full of bad people who don't want to identify the root cause of the process bottleneck. It’s far more likely that your team is busy combating bottlenecks and simply don’t have time to perform a complete analysis of the problem. They may not even know where to start looking.
Don’t worry, we’ve got your back. Read this article to find out what a business process bottleneck is and how to resolve the underlying issues.
What are business process bottlenecks?
A business process bottleneck is a step in a workflow where work stalls.
Work stalls for a reason, usually because the person performing the task lacks capacity, information, or authority. When this happens, work piles up, and the employee responsible for this part of the process is usually working at a frantic pace without getting much done.
This might happen when:
- A task needs additional approval before it can be performed.
- A handoff must happen to an already overworked department.
- A proposal cannot go out until a specific person reviews it.
- A new customer must wait on several employees to complete a series of tasks before they can take the first onboarding step.
- A support request moves between departments before reaching someone in authority.
A process bottleneck might go unnoticed if the delay is spread across many people or departments. That’s because each person only sees the short wait in their department; they don’t see the entire process at a global level. But the customer feels the delay in real time.
Bottlenecks can damage reputation and cost the business.
Why do business process bottlenecks become more common as a company grows?
Business growth amplifies any flaw within the company exponentially.
Growth adds customers, employees, tasks, and products to processes that were built for a smaller operation. A step that took ten minutes with five clients can take a full day with fifty.
When a company experiences growth, several things can change at once:
- The owner who used to approve every decision has fewer hours to spend on requests.
- Informal conversations that kept employees in-the-know can’t reach everyone.
- New hires don’t know the unwritten rules that the original team followed without thinking.
- New tools have been added over time, and they may not connect with each other seamlessly.
Most companies design processes for the company they have - not the size they reach. When business processes are built for a smaller company, bottlenecks will get built in.
Seven signs of a process bottleneck
The most reliable sign of a bottleneck is a delay that repeats in the same part of the process. When customers complain about the same part of the onboarding process every time, your team needs to rework that step.
Here are seven other signs:
- A team that blows past deadlines, even when they are working hard to meet them.
- Overloaded employees.
- Lack of ownership for tasks that actively need to be performed.
- Impatient customers who keep following up on their project.
- Team members who seem lost or don’t know who gets a handoff.
- Projects that have to be reworked.
- Workarounds that employees have built to get past the slow step.
One or two of these may happen during a busy week. However, recurring signs or patterns you and your team keep encountering point to a process bottleneck.
Where do workflow bottlenecks commonly occur?
Workflow bottlenecks tend to cluster in six areas. Each has a different cause and solution.
1. Roles and responsibilities
This comes down to ownership.
When one job title is assumed to own a task, but no one has told the titleholder, no one will do it. Alternatively, if two people think the other owns a task, that task will sit in limbo forever. Finally, when one person owns too many tasks, those tasks will fall behind and stay behind unless that person gets help.
The solution is building accountability by a) assigning task ownership within a process, b) ensuring the ownership is held by job title - not an individual’s name, and c) assigning and monitoring metrics to the process.
This ensures a manager can keep things flowing and helps employees know who to go to when they are ready for handoff.
2. Approvals and decision-making
Implementing an approval process can protect the business from errors, but it also adds to wait times. This means approvals should be implemented only when absolutely necessary, and they should be applied consistently.
The same applies to decision-making responsibilities. Granting an employee the power to give a $50 refund at their discretion makes sense. But a refund of $50,000? That should be sent to someone with a bit more authority before the refund occurs.
3. Communication and handoffs
One of the most common places work stalls is when it passes from one person or department to another. Without a process, the sender assumes the receiver has what they need, and the receiver has to ask questions and wait for answers.
Process-driven handoffs solve this easily. Implement a standardized handoff form or checklist that gives the receiving team what they need on day one. Departments can build this handoff form together and make life much easier for one another.
Our guide on documenting cross-department processes and improving team handoffs walks through this process step by step, and the post on the hidden cost of poor internal communication shows what these gaps cost.
4. Workflows and task dependencies
Often, tasks build on one another. So, one task cannot start until another task is completed. When a process lists steps in the wrong order, work bottlenecks. Alternatively, work will also stall if tasks that can run in parallel are being completed one at a time.
Solve this by reviewing workflows for steps that can happen in parallel, steps that no longer serve a purpose, and steps that are placed in the wrong sequence. Removing redundancy from your processes can free up a lot of time, as can fixing sequencing issues.
5. Technology and manual work
Sometimes a task has to be completed manually. There’s just no way around it. Other times, though, you can automate something, speeding up the process and freeing employees to work on tasks that require human decision-making. This is one way technology can solve a bottleneck.
Another common bottleneck is actually caused by technology. This happens when tools don't speak to each other, so information gets lost in translation. For example, if the CRM doesn’t share data with the billing system, your team will have to manually translate that information, which is time-consuming and frankly unnecessary. In this case, map out the workflow and find software that does what you need, rather than trying to make your current software work. Just remember that, before you add new software, you must confirm that the underlying process works.
6. Reliance on key individuals
Many companies depend on one or two people who know how the entire business works. They are key players, but they also become the bottleneck because every question, exception, and decision passes through them. If your team has to wait for one person to return from vacation to complete a task that no one else can do, that’s a sign that your business relies too heavily on one person.
The solution is to get the knowledge out of their head. You can do this by creating a knowledge-transfer process. The person doesn’t have to be leaving the business for you to document their knowledge, key processes, and reasoning. By documenting their knowledge, you are freeing them up to take uninterrupted vacations, enjoy family time, and have easy recoveries from illness - not to mention a worry-free retirement!
How do you find the root of a bottleneck?
Start by tracing the work from beginning to end. Where does it stall?
Once you’ve identified the step where the wait is longest, you can look at that spot or a little earlier to identify what’s going on.
Here’s a brief checklist you can follow:
- Map the existing process: Observe and write down each step, who performs it, and what triggers the next step.
- Measure wait times and work hours: Record how long work sits before someone touches it and how long the task takes once started.
- Talk to the people who do the work: Employees know where they wait, where they redo tasks, and which workarounds they use. Ask them what slows them down.
- Keep asking “why?” until you get an answer: If approvals take too long, ask why. The answer may be that the approver is overloaded, the request arrives without enough detail, or nobody knows who the backup is. Each cause leads to a different fix.
- Look upstream for clues: A slow step often reflects a problem earlier in the process, such as incomplete information passed forward. Fix the true cause instead of just addressing the slow step.
- Test the fix on a small scale: Change one part of the process, measure the result for a few weeks, and adjust before rolling it out to the whole company.
Read our guide on building comprehensive processes to get an in-depth description of how to document what you find.
How does fixing process bottlenecks support operations and help a business scale?
Removing a bottleneck does several things:
- Increases the amount of work your business can handle without adding staff or extending hours.
- Gives your staff the ability to communicate predictable turnaround times to customers.
- Reduces the number of errors.
- Cuts down on staff overwhelm and burnout.
- Improves efficiency.
- Builds a reputation for reliability.
Bottlenecks will reappear as your company changes and grows. So, it’s essential to consistently review key workflows and monitor the metrics you’ve assigned to each process.
Are you ready to identify the bottlenecks that are building up in your business? Contact us today to schedule a free initial consultation.
