Management tools utilization for disclosing firm's constraints

This diploma thesis is focused on the use of management tools and practices specialized in finding organizations constraints that limit their performance and make it impossible to effectively achieve their goal. The tools can be divided into static ones that describe relationships between causes and their effects using causal relations and dynamic ones that are oriented on cyclical relations that appear in periods. Although those dynamic tools are not suitable enough for validating causal relations they can better visualize these relations in time. Both of the tools are based on the principle that the user has to change the way of thinking when looking for undesirable effects in the system. The theoretical part of the thesis is extended by Greiner growth model that describes growth phases of organizations and typical problems that appear in each phase. Thus this model can be used to help uncover causes of organizations constraints. Practical part of the thesis is focused on application of the tools and on finding the main constraint in a small software company. It is divided into a few parts: company description, proposal of requirement collection and its implementation, description of relationships between the company and external systems, proposal of an improvement of a notation that is used for diagramming current state of problems in a company, diagramming the current reality tree and finding the main constraint. The contribution of the thesis lies in depicting advantages and disadvantages of the tools used for finding company constraints and in application of one of the tools including the proposal of improvement. The conclusion includes recommendations for improvement implementation that help to eliminate main company constraint and increase the system performance.