Review Constraint Migration

The movement of a bottleneck or risk from one part of a system to another after an intervention appears to remove it.

A change may make one problem disappear locally while creating a new limiting point somewhere else. The constraint moved; the system did not necessarily become less constrained.

Local success can hide downstream delay, risk, cost, or workload. Looking for migration keeps improvement work focused on the whole system.

Automating intake removes an office backlog, but incomplete requests now reach technicians faster and create a larger clarification queue in the field.

Constraint migration does not mean the intervention failed. It means the next limiting condition must be identified before claiming system-wide improvement.

The bottleneck disappeared here—but where did it go?

* [[bottleneck|Bottleneck]] * [[friction|Friction]] * [[upstream-downstream|Upstream and Downstream]] * [[system|System]]

* [Kevin Hein, “Continuous Improvement Using Theory of Constraints,” American Society for Quality](https://asq.org/quality-resources/articles/continuous-improvement-using-theory-of-constraints?id=c1a7b24cf212423ca10c67402cebb11f) — states that after the current weak link is strengthened, the process returns to identify the system’s new constraint. This supports the mechanism behind the Renaissance Solutions term; the source uses Theory of Constraints language, not the label “Constraint Migration.”

* Compare with [[bottleneck|Bottleneck]] and [[upstream-downstream|Upstream and Downstream]].