Business Process Improvement: Find and Fix Bottlenecks

Map workflows, establish a baseline, investigate constraints and test changes before scaling your operations.

Created byDr. Law Payne

Last updated 11/2026

English

What you'll learn

Map how work moves through a process and locate the queue that governs throughput.
Establish a baseline with cycle time, waiting time, throughput and rework evidence.
Compare plausible causes and choose a countermeasure you can test.
Plan a bounded process improvement and decide whether the result supports expansion.

Course content

2 sections • 10 lectures • 1h 50m total length

The Decision and the First Useful Result10:39
Find the wait inside Alder’s approval queue. Identify which timestamps the system can verify and which review-start event is missing. Use the worksheet to compare how two scenarios change customer turnaround and the number of cases waiting.
Flow in Practice11:46
Map Alder Claims’ ordinary and exception routes. Calculate elapsed time for each route and separate document waiting from approval waiting. Compare same-day decision rates across two samples and explain what changed.
Baseline and the Evidence Behind It11:24
Build a baseline that tracks receipt, readiness, first review, and a usable decision. Calculate route-level and overall rates for two weeks, then explain how excluding eight open claims changes the result. Use the worksheet to document your reporting period and inclusion rules.
Bottlenecks Without Hidden Assumptions11:03
Use arrivals and completions to calculate three queue outcomes and the five-day completion rate needed to clear twelve waiting claims. Compare distinct completions with total visits and test how removing five avoidable repeat visits changes capacity under stated assumptions.
The Foundation Case and Your First Deliverable10:49
Design a two-week test of a protected noon review window. Draw both routes with owners and timestamps, reconcile the queue scenarios, and use the workshop worksheet to define the resource cap, comparison group, coverage fallback, and measures for early decisions and returns.

Root Causes Through a Worked Case11:03
Test three explanations for ready exceptions that sit in the queue: gaps in backup coverage, timing, and tagging. Calculate delayed shares, examine how one case changes a four-case sample, and identify evidence that would weaken each explanation.
Countermeasures and Practical Constraints11:05
Compare backup routing with a change to review timing or case categories. Calculate capacity under two ways of splitting an hour, then see how a twenty-minute review changes Thursday demand. Explain which delay each countermeasure could address.
Control and Progress Checks11:05
Track queue performance alongside decision quality. Calculate exception rates and reconcile the ordinary queue balance. Use the worksheet to decide how to handle recent cases and explain why nine aged cases divided by 84 arrivals does not measure delay in that arrival cohort.
A Second Case With a Different Constraint10:46
Compare two queues that grow for different reasons. Reconstruct Alder’s case times to distinguish ownership from capacity problems, then calculate Merritt’s workload and capacity gap under the original, improved-evidence, and higher-volume scenarios.
The Complete Application Workshop10:50
Write two test plans with a customer outcome, eligible cases, an owner, and a checkpoint. Reproduce Alder’s case durations and queue increase, calculate Merritt’s three workload scenarios, and explain when temporary coverage could help.

Requirements

Bring a process you want to improve or work from the supplied fictional cases.

Description

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Your backlog is growing. Where would you change the workflow first?

The delay you see at the end of a process may have started three handoffs earlier. Add capacity in the wrong place and the queue can move while customers wait just as long. I designed this course to help you trace the delay, identify a constraint you can test, and show your team what changed.

What you’ll build

A process map that follows actual work from intake through handoff and completion.
A baseline that distinguishes queue age, review time, and the outcomes customers care about.
A small improvement test with clear eligibility rules, practical capacity limits, and quality guardrails.
A review plan for deciding whether to keep, adjust, or stop the change.

Who I designed this for

This course is for operations leads, business analysts, managers, and consultants responsible for a process that keeps missing expectations. Bring a real workflow or work through the course cases to practice the same decisions.

How you’ll practice

I’m Dr. Law Payne. I drew on my graduate training in business to design the worksheets and worked examples. You'll use them to check the math, trace exceptions, and make a recommendation a manager can review.

Enroll with one process you want to improve. Leave with a baseline, a test you can run, and a clear way to decide what to do with the result.

Who this course is for:

Managers, founders, consultants and operations professionals responsible for improving how work flows.

Business Process Improvement: Find and Fix Bottlenecks

What you'll learn

Explore related topics

Course content

Foundations and First Decisions5 lectures • 56min

Applied Practice and Case Workshop5 lectures • 55min

Requirements

Description

Who this course is for: