How to Make Things Faster

Chapter 12. Collateral Benefit

Here are the steps I’ve covered so far for starting a performance improvement project:

1. List the symptoms for which the business needs relief (report’s too slow, can’t find “Xerox” fast enough, can’t print shipping labels…).

2. Sort the list into business priority order.

The next step is to dig in and get going:

3. For each symptom in the sorted list, look at it, find out why it consumes the time that it does, and cure its cause to relieve the symptom.

The job is to determine the cause of each symptom. There may be some hypotheses about each cause (as Phyllis’s company had hypothesized that disk I/O was the cause of her slow report), but it is vital to determine positively that this is the cause of that before you start “fixing” things. So, where do you begin?

You begin right here, with your prioritized list of symptoms:

Symptom	Priority	Status (team)	Cause
S1	1	Open	?
S2	1	Open	?
…	…	…	…

So, imagine that you have two teams T1 and T2. Imagine that team T1 relieves symptom S1 by curing cause C1, and, working in parallel, team T2 relieves symptom S2 by curing cause C2. Then you can update your list:

Symptom	Priority	Status (team)	Cause
S1	1	Open Resolved (T1)	? C1
S2	1	Open Resolved (T2)	? C2
…	…	…	…

Now imagine that there’s some other symptom S14 sitting way down the list at priority 4, and that—out of the blue—the users who’ve been experiencing symptom S14 unexpectedly report that S14 is resolved now, too.

So you can ...