Massive and Small Problems on the Job Site.

Massive and Small Problems, and Why the Order You Solve Them In Matters

Here’s the deal. During a recent field walk, I watched a genuinely strong team handle big, massive roadblocks really well, while quietly letting the small ones slip through unaddressed. That observation, paired with a deeper conversation I had afterward about how waste actually gets eliminated, revealed something worth sharing directly.

Why Small Problems Get Left Behind

I generally recommend visual boards on the wall showing zone maps and logistics plans, where trade partners place red magnets directly on the board to flag real problems. Those magnets go up before the meeting even starts, specifically so the meeting itself is not wasted on the motion of physically posting each issue. Once the meeting begins, the team works through the board magnet by magnet, spending real time actually removing roadblocks rather than just discussing them.

Some magnets represent genuinely small issues, a stack of plywood sitting in someone’s way, for example. A foreman can simply agree to handle it on the spot, and the magnet comes right off. Other magnets represent something far more serious, an RFI with a hard deadline that could genuinely stop work in two days if left unresolved. That kind of issue needs real escalation, reaching the project engineer, the project manager, and the designers directly, and it either stays on the board or gets transferred into a dedicated roadblock log for ongoing tracking.

What I noticed on this particular project was a team focused almost entirely on that roadblock log, the bigger items. I had to ask directly, how are the smaller issues actually being coordinated? The honest answer was that they were not being coordinated at all. Small problems were simply left out in the field for individual workers to notice, walk around, and figure out on their own time, wasting real effort simply because nobody addressed them in the meeting itself.

We genuinely need three distinct levels of roadblock tracking working together.

• Magnet level roadblocks, small enough to resolve on the spot during the meeting itself, with the magnet coming down immediately once handled.
• Roadblock log level items, serious enough to need ongoing tracking across multiple meetings until fully resolved.
• Escalated items significant enough to require attention at a genuine owner, architect, and contractor meeting, reaching well beyond the immediate project team.

We cannot ever only cover the big items, and we cannot ever only cover the small ones either. Everything needs a real place on the board, attacked visually every single day. Done consistently, that list should never grow large enough to become genuinely unmanageable.

Why a Narrow Focus on Waste Alone Can Backfire

I was talking recently with someone from a production department who described their entire focus as eliminating waste. That reminded me of a pit crew analogy I use constantly. If a pit crew looks idle while a car is out on the track, someone focused purely on spotting waste might conclude that crew is doing nothing and should be eliminated, or kept busy with something else in the meantime. Then the car actually pulls in for service, and if that same crew is now distracted doing something else entirely, it takes too long to get the car back out, and the race gets lost because of it.

This is exactly the trap of looking at any single concept in isolation. You cannot build your entire approach around waste alone, or around theory of constraints alone, or around work in progress alone, or around big problems versus small ones. Everything genuinely connects as one single system, and how you categorize a problem should never get in the way of your actual ability to solve it.

Why Overburden, Unevenness, and Waste Form a Genuine Sequence

Here is something genuinely remarkable I want to share. Removing overburden first, unevenness second, and waste third is not simply a priority ranking. It is an actual procedural sequence, where each step genuinely enables the next one to happen.

• Addressing overburden means reducing work in progress until the actual workload sits genuinely within people’s real capacity. This also does something else important, it lets real problems finally become visible that excess work in progress was previously hiding.
• Once that visibility exists, unevenness becomes genuinely identifiable, specifically the stops and restarts that typically happen right at a real bottleneck. This is exactly where Eliyahu Goldratt’s theory of constraints thinking becomes useful, helping pinpoint precisely where that bottleneck actually sits.
• Once the actual bottleneck location is clear, you can finally go to work eliminating waste specifically at that bottleneck, using the eight, or sometimes nine, wastes framework to guide exactly where to focus.

Notice how beautifully these three steps build on each other rather than functioning as three separate, unrelated priorities. Reducing work in progress reveals the bottleneck. Identifying the bottleneck tells you precisely where to eliminate waste. None of these steps makes full sense without the one that came before it.

Skipping straight to waste elimination without doing this groundwork first tends to scatter effort across the entire project, removing small inefficiencies everywhere while the one constraint actually limiting overall output stays completely untouched. The sequence exists precisely to prevent that kind of unfocused, well intentioned effort.

What I Would Actually Do Running a Project

If I were running a project with this in mind, I would write down every problem touching overburden, unevenness, or waste as it surfaces. I would align work in progress first, until it is genuinely manageable. Only then would I map out where the bottlenecks causing unevenness actually sit. From there, I would subordinate everything else to that bottleneck specifically, working to increase its capacity or remove waste directly at that one critical point.

Why Both Lessons Point to the Same Underlying Truth

Covering only big roadblocks while ignoring small ones is a form of the exact same myopia as chasing waste without first understanding capacity and bottlenecks. In both cases, a narrow focus on one category, scale, or concept quietly hides real problems sitting just outside that narrow view.

Building This Integrated Thinking Into Your Own Project

None of this requires choosing between tracking big problems and small ones, or between eliminating waste and understanding theory of constraints. It requires holding all of it together as one connected system, addressing capacity first, locating the real bottleneck second, and eliminating waste specifically where it actually matters third.

If your project needs superintendent coaching, project support, or leadership development, Elevate Construction can help your teams build genuinely integrated problem solving, covering every scale of roadblock and following the real sequence that actually makes waste elimination effective, rather than tackling each concept in isolation.

So here is the challenge. Look at your own current roadblock board and ask honestly whether small problems are genuinely being addressed alongside the big ones, or quietly left for individual workers to sort out on their own. Then ask whether your team is reducing work in progress before hunting for waste, or jumping straight to waste elimination without first locating the real bottleneck underneath it.

Jason Schroeder said it plainly: “Remove overburden first, unevenness second, and then waste third.” Follow that real sequence, and cover every scale of problem at once, and watch how much more effectively your team actually solves what is genuinely in front of it.

On we go.

FAQ

Why does the article warn against a project team focusing only on the roadblock log and ignoring smaller, magnet level problems?

Because smaller problems, left unaddressed in a formal meeting, do not disappear, they simply get pushed onto individual workers who have to notice, navigate around, and resolve them on their own time instead. Tracking only the bigger items creates a false sense of thorough problem solving while real, smaller inefficiencies continue accumulating unaddressed in the field.

Why might someone mistakenly identify an idle pit crew as waste worth eliminating?

Because a narrow focus on visible busyness, without understanding the crew’s actual purpose, makes genuine readiness look identical to unnecessary idleness from the outside. The crew’s real value only becomes visible the moment a car actually needs service, which a surface level search for waste completely misses if it judges activity only by what is happening right now rather than what the role is actually there to provide.

Why does reducing work in progress specifically help reveal where a real bottleneck is located?

Because excess work in progress tends to mask genuine capacity problems, spreading effort so thin across many tasks that no single constraint stands out clearly. Once work in progress is reduced to a genuinely manageable level, stops and restarts become visible exactly where they are actually happening, typically right at the real bottleneck limiting the entire system.