Under-resolved

Almost every operator who is struggling describes the problem as a shortage. Not enough people, not enough time, not enough budget, not enough authority. Some of them are right. Most of them are describing the symptom of something else.

There is a result from cybernetics called the law of requisite variety. Stated plainly: a controller can only regulate a system to the extent that it can distinguish the states that system can be in. You cannot control a condition your instruments cannot tell apart from a different condition.

Applied to an operation, that says something uncomfortable. If your reporting cannot distinguish a process that is slow from a process that is queued behind an owner who is on holiday, you cannot manage the difference, and no amount of additional headcount will help, because more people acting on an indistinct signal produce more motion at the same resolution.

This is why adding resource so often changes nothing except cost. The constraint was never the amount of force available. It was the number of distinct states the operator could see, and force applied at the wrong resolution goes into the wrong place at higher speed.

So the question this course keeps returning to is not what you should do. It is what you can currently tell apart, and what you would have to install in order to tell apart more.