Improving Flow

Continuous improvement

Back in the days when faxing between companies was a popular thing, I recall a client that had a workflow like this:

Fax arrives and is printed by the fax machine
Paper is picked up by a person and carried to the scanner where is it digitized.
Paper is immediately shredded because there was confidential information on it.

Focus on Value

Whatever we focus on, we’ll get more of. If we focus on the flow of value then we’ll get more value. If we focus on being busy then we’ll get more of that.

I’m playing around with visualizing flow efficiency in my JiraMetrics tool. Flow efficiency is the percentage of time that we’re actually adding value to the work item divided by the total time. So if a ticket is open for 10 hours but in that time we only spend 2 hours actually working on it then the flow efficiency would be 2 / 10 or 20%.

Looking for improvement

I was asked recently what things I’d look at to determine if a team or group is improving and there are three main areas. In all three cases, none of these prove that improvement is happening. What they do provide is a place to me to start asking questions so that I can discover more.

High WIP invalidates prioritization

The more items we have in progress at once (WIP), the less important our initial prioritization is. When we work on one item at a time then items get done in the order we started them so we are completing them in the order of most importance.

Hybrid teams

For decades before covid, were were already using a hybrid model. We’d outsource part of our development teams to other countries, like India. We’d then have part of our teams collocated in our offices and some people calling in from that other country.

Audit

We commonly hear things along the lines of “that’s required for audit purposes” and it’s therefore not to be questioned. If it really is needed for audit then we should certainly do it. Yet, every time I’ve had the opportunity to talk to an auditor, I discover that they don’t want most of the things that we give them.

Fractional people

I worked with two teams that shared a database specialist, for a fairly proprietary system. Because she was on two teams, they had her attend all meetings for both teams. Two standups, two planning meetings, two retrospectives. She ended up doing crazy amounts of overtime because she couldn’t get her regular work done during the day. Her days were filled with meetings, and it was only after everyone else left that she got anything done.

Optimizing for time overlap

If we want people to actively collaborate then they have to be working at the same time. It’s irrelevant whether they’re in the same physical room if they don’t work the same hours. If one person comes in early and another comes in late then there is no benefit in forcing them into the same place.

Learning to say no

A team I was coaching was coming up on an important deadline. Specific functionality had been promised for a certain date that was now eight weeks away, and they wanted to know if they were going to make it.