Companion tool · Part 8

Flow & Constraint Diagnostic

Walk through Part 8's Five Focusing Steps with your own numbers. Five short steps, then a personalized diagnosis you can use directly in a client conversation.

Before you start

What this diagnostic does

It doesn't tell you anything new about the Theory of Constraints — it just makes you answer the same four questions the Five Focusing Steps always start with, then plugs your answers into the framework so the output reads like a diagnosis instead of a worksheet. Have rough numbers ready: current WIP, recent throughput, and a sense of where work backs up.

Step 1 of 4

Work in progress & throughput

Little's Law (Part 8.1): cycle time follows directly from these two numbers.

Current WIP (items actively in flight)

Throughput (items completed)

Per

Implied avg. cycle time—

Step 2 of 4

Where does the queue actually form?

Not where work is assigned — where it sits waiting. That location is the constraint; everywhere else is noise until that one thing changes.

Describe the location (a role, a step, a system, a person)

Has this been the same location for a while, or does it move around?Stays put — it's been the same bottleneck for a while, like one machine on a factory line.Wanders — it genuinely shifts week to week between different people, teams, or systems.

Step 3 of 4

What kind of constraint is it?

Part 8.2 — conflating these is the most common mistake. The five steps work differently depending on which kind is in play.

Physical — a resource (labor, a machine, material) whose capacity is genuinely smaller than the demand on it.Physical — one person's attention — the resource is a specific person's cognitive bandwidth, not headcount or a machine. Context-switching cost is the symptom.Policy — a rule, habit, or approval requirement caps throughput even though no physical resource is maxed out.Market — the limit is outside the organization; demand itself is the ceiling.Paradigm — an unstated assumption nobody has thought to question yet.

Diagnosis

Your Five Focusing Steps

Want the underlying formulas? Try theFlow Formula Calculator — or see the full walkthrough with a worked example in theFlow Deck. If your constraint is a policy one, seeWIP Limits vs. the Theory of Constraintsfor where a WIP limit actually helps.