The hidden cost of broken processes

Broken processes hide because everyone close to them has adapted. The team knows the workaround; the manager knows the escalation path; the customer only sees the delay. What gets reported upward is the official procedure — not what actually happens.

The first is called Little's Law, and it's wonderfully simple:

In plain words: the amount of work sitting in your system equals how fast work arrives times how long each piece stays. Flip it round and it becomes a lie detector: count the work currently in progress, divide by how much you complete per week, and you get your real lead time — whatever the plan says. No assumptions, no exceptions.

The second explains why busy-ness is a trap. For a queue with one server, waiting time grows roughly in proportion to:

where $\rho$ is how busy the resource is, as a fraction of full capacity. Read what that little fraction does. At 50% busy it equals 1. At 80% busy: 4. At 95% busy: 19. Pushing a team from 80% to 95% "utilisation" doesn't add a bit of delay — it roughly quintuples the queue. This is why the department where everyone is flat-out is also the one where nothing ever comes back on time. It's not a character flaw. It's arithmetic.

And unevenness makes it all worse — irregular arrivals and unpredictable task sizes multiply the waiting further. That's why standardising work speeds things up even when nobody works faster.

• Touch time vs elapsed time — hours of actual work inside weeks of waiting. Ratios of 1:20 are common, and disbelieved until measured.
• First-time-right rate — how much work passes through without correction. Every failure is paid for at least twice.
• The cost of one week's delay — price the queue using Little's Law, and the backlog suddenly has a price tag.

Walk one process end to end, as it actually runs, with the people who run it — that's the discipline where the Chido method starts. And if you'd like a second pair of eyes on the walk, that's exactly what a discovery call is for.