Hey, my name is Tristan Hood and I love helping leaders and teams find new and better ways of managing work. I believe continual, organic change is far superior to large transformation, unless absolutely necessary of course. As such, I created this blog with the intent to share my experiences, wins, and losses. Today we discuss Kanban Practice 3, Measuring & Managing Flow, in our 6 part series.
Webster’s defines Flow as:
Noun: a smooth uninterrupted movement or progress.
To some, this can be somewhat abstract to relate this to the way we work. For those people, referring to work moving through a workflow as “flowing” seems to generate goofy stares, as though I was speaking in an unknown tongue when we weren’t at church. “Explain it to me as though you would a golden retriever,” is something someone once told me. I won’t go that far in this article.
Simply speaking, you want work to enter and exit your workflow like water moves through a stream. Like a butterfly (or leaf) on the wind. Like a bee moving effortlessly from one flower to the next, only stopping long enough to gather bits of value before returning to the hive with a successful haul. When we refer to the flow of work, this is what we mean. And just like you can measure how much water moves from one part of stream to another to calculate the flow rate of the stream, so too can you measure the flow of work in your workflow. And if you can measure it, you can manage it.
Connecting the Dots
In part one and two of this journey of becoming experts at managing work we discussed the value of seeing the work as well as the value of limiting how much work we try to juggle. Once you can see your work and know how to limit the intake valve, you can begin to fine tune the movement of the work that’s in flight which, in turn, creates Flow. This is where I have seen teams start to blow the lid off of their productivity. With vision and focus, we finally achieve the bandwidth to fix the process we use to complete work. That’s where the practice of Managing our flow, the third of the six Kanban Practices, becomes critical.
I’ve worked with teams that began managing their flow with an improvement so simple you wont believe it worked. Conversely, I’ve worked with teams that got a bit ambitious with their improvement journey and, in trying to change too much, stalled their improvement journey, but we will save that one for a future Tidbit.
With a bit of discipline and patience, learning to Manage your Flow can be one of the most rewarding improvement efforts you will experience as a human.
Bold claims, I know. Story time.
The Rogue Outlier
For one particular team I coached almost as soon as they started to measure their workflow they noticed something wasn’t right. Among the work that was in flight, most of which had only been in flight for around a two weeks, they found an outlier. Prior to measuring, the item had been hanging around on their Kanban board, but they never really looked at how long it had been there. Seeing a visual chart made the outlier pop like a balloon at a 4 year olds birthday party.
For the purposes of measuring work, an “outlier” is just a work item that took way longer to complete than all of the other work. If your team was finishing 99% of their work in under 5 days, an outlier would be that pesky work item that took 20 days.
When the team in question looked at their Aging Work in Progress chart - which is just a fancy chart that shows how long your current work in progress has been in progress - they noticed some work that had been in progress for over a year. The work was obviously not important work and had gotten lost somewhere along the way. I remember them asking the question, “How did we miss that work? How did it get lost? How can we improve our system so something like that does not happen again?” I didn’t even have to prompt them. They intuitively started asking great questions.
And that is why it’s so powerful for a TEAM to measure and understand its flow. They have context on the issues that caused the problem as well as the ability to directly affect those causes. This is why I believe in the principle of encouraging teams to take ownership and act as leaders. Empowering this team to measure their own work and then improve the process is how we become more adaptable as organizations.
It’s that simple. The team started measuring their work in progress, found an outlier, asked some great questions, and implemented a small fix. A few weeks later, they did it again. And again. Thus the cycle of improvement keeps on turning.
Landing the Plane
There are some simple things to consider when Managing and Measuring your Flow. This list is not complete, and I encourage you to find other items to add to this. But this should get you started.
Measure These
Measure each of the following regularly and, just as regularly, ask questions about what you find.
Cycle Time - The amount of time, in days, it takes your team to start and finish delivering work through your workflow.
Throughput - The amount of work your team is able to get through your workflow in a given period.
Flow Efficiency - (Check out the link to the left for a deep dive) The result of dividing the amount of actual active time an items is being worked by the total type it spends in your workflow and multiplying that by 100%. In other words, if something took 10 days to complete, but that item only required 5 days of actual work (the other 5 days it was just waiting) you would have a Flow Efficiency of 50%. Most organizations only reach 5%. I’ve coached teams that routinely hit 60-70%. Again, it’s not about the number, but what questions the numbers cause you to ask about your workflow.
Manage These
Bottlenecks - The spots in your workflow where work slows down and piles up. Check out my Bottleneck article for more.
Blockers - Issues that arise while work is in progress that stops that work from progressing.
Dependencies - Any situation where something required to complete work lies outside the team’s control.
By “Manage These,” I mean identify them when they happen and, similarly to “Measure These,” ask really great questions about what’s happening with the work and how you might improve the situation.
We will go into more detail on each of these in future articles, but that should get you started.
Until next time,
Keep on Learning, Keep on Growing