Applying the TOC Thinking Process: A case study in the government sector

Abstract

In the past, the TOC Thinking Process (TP) has been primarily applied to address managerial challenges in private sector manufacturing, logistics, and project-oriented organizations. The purpose of this paper is to present an application of the TOC TP in a public sector service organization, namely, the Water Utility Division Maintenance System (WUDMS) within the Albuquerque Public Works Department. The two necessary conditions for meeting the WUDMS's goal of effective management are (1) completing work in a waste-free manner and (2) responding promptly to customer requests for service. Although seven undesirable effects (UDEs) were identified by the improvement team, UDEs from three diverse areas were selected for creating the requisite conflict clouds, namely, (1) much repair work is not completed promptly, (2) WUDMS has some wasteful practices, and (3) managers are unable to schedule repair work effectively. Entities from these conflict clouds were synthesized into a core conflict cloud that revolved around the issue of dedicating more human resources to repair work or improvement efforts and that formed the base of the Current Reality Tree. By surfacing assumptions underlying entity pair relationships within the core conflict, a strategic direction for change was identified as: expansion of WUDMS capacity through the use of non-traditional resources. This injection was logically validated via a Future Reality Tree. Initial results from its implementation demonstrate that the direction of the solution is correct.