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CAPACITY-PLANNING5 MIN READ

Work a bottleneck-first staffing decision

Build a staffing response that first recovers hidden bottleneck capacity before adding headcount.

A compliance team has one scarce reviewer with a four-week queue. Leaders want two more reviewers immediately. Exploit and offload before you elevate scarce capacity. The trap is treating backlog as proof that every lost hour at the constraint is already productive and unavoidable. Step 1 Measure how the reviewer currently spends the week. The reviewer spends 14 hours on true review, 6 hours on admin tracking, 4 hours on incomplete packets, and 3 hours in avoidable meetings. Step 2 Separate bottleneck-only work from work others can do. Only the 14 review hours require the scarce expertise. The rest is…

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