Bottleneck - Cont.

Below is some data from my previous project:

Wait stages:
Ready for Dev 78
Ready for BA Acceptance 25
Ready for QA 14
Ready for Showcase 12
Ready for SAT 50

In-process stages:
In Analysis 71
In Dev 92
In QA 10

Its clear that Development is the bottleneck. Development takes the longest time among all the stages. Things just don't move as fast here. So, we push more work into this stage. That is the reason for the high in-process work. And more work means multi-tasking for the developers and consequently, diluted focus. That further adds to the time stories take to move out of this stage. And of course, you just cant push enough through the Development stage, so the inventory piles up. This could be the situation in most software development projects. The symptoms of this bottleneck sometimes showed a high inventory in other stages. But they could be traced back to the Development stage in most cases.

I wonder why we didn't look into the Development stage itself and saw what was happening WITHIN the stage. That could have helped us understand how to speed up the Development process.