Theory of Constraints

A diagnostic runbook for optimizing any process — a CI/build pipeline, a dev value stream, an Agent Skill or plugin, or a runtime code path — through Eliyahu Goldratt's Theory of Constraints (ToC).

The one idea that makes ToC powerful: every system has exactly one binding constraint at a time, and global throughput rises only when you improve that constraint. Effort spent anywhere else produces nothing — "an hour saved at a non-bottleneck is a mirage." This runbook finds the constraint with measurement, then walks the Five Focusing Steps to relieve it without creating new problems.

When to Apply

Use this skill when the user wants to optimize a process or workflow and any of these are true:

• They want to optimize but don't know where to start ("make this faster", "why is this slow", "reduce the cost of this").
• A local speedup didn't move the end-to-end result (you optimized the wrong thing).
• Work, queues, or WIP pile up at one stage while others sit idle.
• Everything looks 100% busy but little ships (high utilization, low throughput).
• They added capacity, parallelism, or resources and it didn't help.
• Fixing one bottleneck just surfaces another.
• The real limiter is a policy or rule, not a resource (a mandatory full test suite, serialized review, a "read every reference" instruction, batch-everything releases).
• They're stuck in a tradeoff that blocks the obvious fix ("faster vs safer", "smaller context vs more coverage").