The Z-Scale Assessment Series

The Team Throughput Audit (ASTA)

Your system moves at the speed of one team — the bottleneck. This shows whether the rest are feeding it, starving it, or piling up work in front of it — and what fixing that is worth.

Built on Goldratt's Drum-Buffer-RopeiDrum-Buffer-Rope (Goldratt) — how to run a system around its slowest point:
• Drum — the bottleneck; it sets the pace for everyone
• Buffer — a small reserve of work kept in front of the drum so it never starves
• Rope — release new work only as fast as the drum can consume itThe whole system moves at the speed of the drum — so you protect and elevate the drum, not the busy teams around it.. It's directional, not a stopwatch study — the point is to see reality clearly enough to act. Enter demonstrated rates (what teams actually deliver), not headcount math.

From Raising the Dead: Converting Your Workforce from Zombies to Zealots · by Jerry Peterson

1 · The drum — your bottleneck team

The constraint sets the pace for the whole system. Find it first; everything else is measured against it.

Bottleneck team / role

Its throughput finished jobs / units per week

Average revenue per finished unit ($)

% of the bottleneck's time on work a non-bottleneck could do prep, setup, admin, chasing info

Cognitive load of the bottleneck's work iCognitive load is the mental effort the work itself demands — not a measure of the team. Three parts:
• Intrinsic — how inherently complex the work is
• Germane — how much new learning it requires
• Extraneous — friction from how work is organizedBecause you're entering a demonstrated rate, this load is already baked in — so here it tempers the elevation estimate rather than discounting the rate. No double-counting.

Your demonstrated rate already reflects this, so we don't discount it. It tempers how much freeing up the constraint can realistically elevate output.

Intrinsic complexity how hard the work inherently is

Germane load new learning the work demands

Cognitive-load factor: 0.92×

2 · The feeder teams — everyone who supplies the drum

For each team feeding the bottleneck, enter its demonstrated feed rate in the same unit as the drum (bottleneck-ready units per week), and its variability drivers. Those drivers size the buffer.

Feeder team

Feed/wk

Unplanned work

Skill concentration