Three months of waiting, six days of work. On lead time and process optimisation.

An employer is looking for someone and brings in an agency. There is a vacancy, there is an agreement, and everyone wants the same outcome: the right person at work. A good three months later, the chosen candidate signs.

Ask anyone working on that assignment along the way whether things are slow, and nobody says yes. The job advert was written the same day. A conversation with a candidate takes an hour. The report was ready in half a day. Every single step is fast.

And yet the whole thing takes three months. Both of those are true, and the entire story sits in that gap.

The waiting sits between the steps

Add up the work in the top bar and you reach 47 hours: not even six working days. The lead time is 624.5 hours. Everything in between, a good ninety-two per cent, is waiting.

A job advert that is ready on Tuesday only appears on Friday, because that is what was agreed with the supplier. A list of candidates waits for somebody else to run the search. An interview waits for the first moment when the diaries of the candidate, the consultant and the employer line up. An invoice waits for a signature at head office.

Each of those waiting moments is small and defensible. Together, they are the process.

Why nobody notices

Everyone sees their own step, and it takes half a day. Nobody sees the line from start to finish, because nobody owns it. The client is the only one who experiences the full lead time, and the client is not in the team meeting.

It is the same blind spot as with change load: every part is reasonable, and still the sum does not add up. Whoever does not do the sum does not see the problem, and therefore steers on what they can see: working harder inside the steps. That is precisely where there is nothing to gain.

What a redesign does

Look at the second bar. The lead time drops from 624.5 to 512.5 hours, and the amber blocks stay almost as wide. No work has been taken out. Waiting time has been taken out.

That happened through changes that are all about design rather than effort. Putting the vacancy online the same day instead of once a week. Letting the consultant search the CV databases directly instead of waiting for a colleague. A phone or video conversation instead of a first interview at the office. Administration held at one point instead of at every unit separately.

The third bar goes a step further: the employer chooses which route their request follows, recruitment with or without assessment. Whoever does not need an assessment does not wait for one either. Three months then come down to roughly ten weeks.

Waiting time is a design question

Waiting time appears wherever work moves from one pair of hands to another. The more hands, the more handovers, and every handover is a moment where something sits until somebody else has time. The number of hands follows from how the work is divided, and that is organisational design.

Counting the handovers alone does not help either. Who decides also determines how long something stands still: an approval that sits three signatures away waits three times. That is what Everyone waits for green is about.

In practice the two coincide. Process optimisation starts from the process as it really runs, lead time and waiting time included, and then almost always arrives at the question of how the work is divided. The process shows where the time goes; the design explains why.

Count it yourself

Take one service your organisation delivers, and count two things. First: how much time sits between the client’s request and the moment it is answered? Then: how many hours of actual work went into it during that period?

The difference between those two numbers is waiting time. It costs your client patience, your people energy and your organisation revenue - and it is in nobody’s diary.

Curious how that works out for you? Do let me know. A conversation about it is always welcome.