# Mission: Apply Theory of Constraints in a Service Business

## Why
Learn to diagnose and improve flow in a real service business, using the IT-Premium recurring-services and RFC/project streams as the running case. The practical outcome is better management decisions: focus scarce attention on the system constraint, improve throughput without damaging SLA performance, and know when the constraint has moved.

## Success looks like
- Define a service system's goal, boundary, flow units, and necessary conditions.
- Distinguish a visible queue, shared resource, and local bottleneck from the system constraint.
- Apply the five focusing steps to an RFC or managed-service value stream.
- Design a safe operational experiment and scorecard that can confirm or falsify a constraint hypothesis.
- Use throughput, operating expense, investment, WIP, flow time, and reliability without optimizing local utilization.

## Constraints
- Use the 19 July 2026 IT-Premium analysis as the recurring example, while generalizing every method to other service businesses.
- Prefer short interactive lessons, retrieval practice, and printable quick references.
- Keep recurring managed services and RFC/project work as separate operational queues even when they share people.
- Treat sensitive operational figures as course-case data, not public benchmarks.

## Out of scope
- Full Critical Chain Project Management implementation.
- Detailed TOC Thinking Processes beyond the minimum needed to test constraint hypotheses.
- Prescriptive changes to IT-Premium production systems without current data and stakeholder validation.