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Applying TOC principles to improve the voter experience!
I recently had the opportunity to vote in my constituency and used it to observe how the overall voter experience was and what can be done to improve it.
Once a voter enters the hall, it’s a 4 step process and it’s quite clear that the constraint is the last step of using the EVM. It is indeed the right place to locate the constraint, since EVMs are capital intensive.
The question is… Are we exploiting the constraint and are we subordinating all other processes to this constraint?
TOC suggests that we should focus on upkeep of the EVM to maximize its uptime on the voting day. Instead what I noticed was a significant number of these machines going down for hours together at my centre. People had to wait for many hours just standing in the queue. Let’s focus on maintaining these machines in better shape.
The second observation was quite intriguing. The entire 4 step process was halted every 2 hours to report how many people voted till then. This was done at step 1 by going through several pages of the roll and counting the tick marks against the names, which took about 10 minutes. The constraint was idle during this time! The same information was available in a ready format at step 3, which would have avoided this stoppage of 10 minutes and the constraint could have continued working non-stop.
These are just preliminary observations with a limited view of the process. I am sure full application of TOC across the entire process will yield many more improvement opportunities.