The Flow Framework resides at the center of the Project to Product movement launched by Mik Kersten a few years ago. This breath of fresh air turns many date project management techniques inside out resulting in significant visibility, transparency and performance gains. These gains are triggered by increased awareness of how value flows combined to data inspired continuous improvement.
For starters you have Flow Metrics to help see the reality of what is going on. Then you the value stream networks, work item type distribution and more to further expose dependencies and how focus is consumed. Let us go a bit deeper and break this down more.
The Flow Metrics
Some words of caution are warranted – never use metrics to reward or punish. Instead, metrics help everyone learn and improve. For example, if one team is knocking it out the park consistently then others may want to learn why they are so successful. Also, many of the old agile & other metrics of yore are now considered proxy or vanity meaning that they might help you feel good about progress but don’t really mean what you think do or are not the best measure of progress.
Flow Distribution – Q: Are we investing in both generating business value AND protection of the value that we already have?
Given the current environment and state what is the ideal balance of the various work item types of Features, Defects, Risks & Debts. Find the right balance and you are far less likely to become hamstrung by technical debt or surprised but a gnarly incident that could have been avoided. The distribution can and should vary over time depending on many things.
Flow Velocity – Q: Is value delivery accelerating?
Similar in some ways to the Agile velocity metric but simplified to represent productivity from the customer perspective. The quantity of work completed and in progress is far more relevant to customers. Simplified focus on the work delivered work items tied to generating business value.
Flow Efficiency – Q: Are delays upstream impacting delivery performance downstream?
Based on Flow Time this is helpful to reveal where there are inefficiencies in the flow such as delays or waiting that could be reduced or eliminated. When Flow efficiency is low then there is waste in the flow of value to be dealt with.
Flow Time – Q: Is time to market getting shorter?
The customer-centric measure of how long it takes to deliver customer value from the point it enters a value stream to when it is delivered to the customer.
Flow Load – Do we have the best balance to match capacity with demand?
A measure of happiness and engagement that correlates to team capacity for output that can impact morale. Reveals the impact of changes in both Flow Velocity and Flow Time impact output. Finding the sweet spot maximizes Flow Velocity while minimizing Flow Time.
The Value Stream Network
Coming soon…
Flow Distribution
Coming soon…
Artifact Network
Coming soon…
Tool network
Coming soon…