What is Flow? How are companies going beyond Scrum to deliver faster?
Increased agility and rapid time to market
In the search for competitive advantage, companies are looking beyond current Agile frameworks like Scrum to be able to deliver customer value more rapidly. A lot of organisations undergoing an Agile transformation arrive at Scrum and do not progress any further. Their release cycles might span over multiple Sprints, while their end to end process from concept to production can span months as work sits in prioritisation queues and backlogs.
The aim of Flow is to measure how work Flows through the organisation, and to reduce all impediments and delays to the point that your planning cycle is 24 hours or less. On the surface, this appears to be an insurmountable challenge, but not when you consider that the governance process and culture of delivery are usually the things holding back greater speed. Both of which can easily be changed.
Fin Goulding’s proposed approach to Flow incorporates:
Lean software development
Kanban
DevOps
Continuous deployment
Customer feedback loops
Watch the video to better understand how Flow fits into the picture, and to identify where your organisation currently sits on the spectrum of ease and efficiency.
Transcript:
Hi, I'm Peter Scheffer
In this short video, I will explain how companies are greatly reducing their speed to deliver value.
This video is part of a series I am producing to help companies get better at optimising their value delivery.
All companies are somewhere on this spectrum.
The spectrum represents the ease and efficiency of building software solutions.
Ease is represented on the vertical axis showing governance - the more controls, orchestration and approvals required, the more difficult it is to build good software. This is heavy governance.
Efficiency is represented on the horizontal axis, a short delivery cycle is where work items move at the greatest speed through the organisation.
When it is difficult to approve, build & release software, we batch a lot of work together into big lumps. Usually projects.
If we batch a lot of work to complete, we must commit our teams for longer durations, preventing other important work from being prioritised for that duration.
Therefore, we must be more certain of the investment before starting the work.
To be more certain, we spend more time in analysis, estimation and planning, and we require business cases, sign-offs & approvals. This is heavy governance.
In Waterfall, we have Projects and Business Cases.
In SAFe, we have Epics and Lean Business Cases.
As we become more Agile, we reduce the planning horizon and need for approvals.
Simple measure of agility is to ask:
For what timeframe are you committing the capacity of your team or teams to the current plan?
The reverse question: how quickly can you redirect all of the team's capacity onto something completely new? Next week? Next quarter? Later in the year? Next year?
Even Scrum is like a mini-waterfall if we believe people like Joe Justice and Fin Goulding.
A lot of companies are doing some form of Scrum, but their planning horizons are over multiple Sprints.
So, what’s at the end of the rainbow? What is lighter in terms of governance, and faster in terms of delivery cycle?
The answer is Flow - a constant stream of small, rapid work items that directly and immediately improve user's experience.
Companies like Tesla already work in this way.
Their planning horizon is no greater than 24 hours.
Their teams are highly responsive and able to change priority incredibly fast in response to their customer's most pressing needs, just like a startup.
A company with short, frequent delivery cycles and that can innovate rapidly is extremely hard to compete against.
So the question is - where are you on this spectrum, and what are the next steps to progress towards Flow?
How will you make work smaller?
How will you make the timeframe from concept to completion shorter?
How will you reduce the governance?
Why is this important anyway?
It’s important because your company’s ability to rapidly change priorities and respond to customers determines its competitiveness. Startups already work like this, and threaten established markets and models.
My name is Peter Scheffer and I help companies optimise for delivery performance.
I improve the performance of delivery teams.
