Manage Flow

You ever been in the zone? You know what I mean? You're kind of in that state where you're just knocking things off your list. Bam, bam. Just moving things to done. You're just killing it. For me, it often comes like my headset on and I'm listening to some. Some music and it's helping me get focused. I'm in the zone, you know? You ever been there? Remember what that feels like? Don't you want to do that more often? That's our third Kanban practice, Manage Flow. We might define flow as, Is individual efficiency important? Sure, of course it is. Is it more important than flow through the system? No, it's not. In fact, we may find that there are certain times where individual inefficiency is actually okay, because the flow through the system is what we really want to measure and what really matters. For example, Scrum Masters, consider this. If your developers are constantly checking in code daily and they're doing their best and they're just super efficient in what they're doing, and yet testing is bottlenecked up and there's work getting hung up in testing, does it really matter how efficient your developers are? No, it doesn't, because flow is inhibited. In order to manage flow, we want to monitor, measure, and optimize the whole. The whole system. Now, part of managing flow will be that you're going to discover that you may need to add some workflow steps. Consider Scrum Masters. Do you do product backlog refinement? Well, as you know, it's during these refinement sessions that your work really becomes ready to be worked on in a given sprint. So let's reflect that in your workflow steps. You may need to add an analyze column work that's ready to be reviewed in product backlog refinement. And after that, then it's really ready for us to begin committing to at Sprint Planning. So let's add a ready column. So these additional columns should help you in matching up against your Scrum events. You're analyzing the work, is it getting it ready and then having it in a ready column so we can actually then pull from that column at Sprint Planning. Now, Kanban is a pull system. Work is pulled through the system, and because of that, our upstream activities can sometimes be blocked because the downstream activities aren't ready. For example, if both dev and test are at their WIP limits, nothing moves, everybody stops. And that's really not good for flow. So what if we created a little buffer state here called ready for development, ready for test, and it's in these buffer columns that you can put work that's ready for the next workflow step downstream. Without buffer columns or buffer states, we can't really see where problems are in the system. Just everything backs up to their WIP limit and stops. So these allow us to really see where work is piling up. Now, just a pro tip from the field. You're probably going to want to apply some WIP limits to those buffer columns. Less developers start pushing 20, 30 stories over to test. And so now it's your turn. Take a look back at your visualized workflow. Are there buffer states you can put in? Go ahead and do that. Hey, Scrum Masters, here's a tip for you. Those daily scrums, those daily standups that you run, they can get a little boring asking the same old three questions. What did you do yesterday? What are you going to do today Is, I think, blocking. Try something different in your daily standup. Instead of asking the three questions, pull the board up, look at the card that's closest to being finished, and ask the team, what's it going to take to complete this card? Can we swarm that card and get this work done? What blockers can I go after and clear up? And when you have the answers to that, choose the next card that's closest to being done. It is much more important that we finish work than start new work. In fact, don't even talk to me about what you're going to begin working on. Talk to me about what you're going to finish. Scrum Masters, great Kanban tip for you. Work the board right to left. Now, Scrum Masters, are you using velocity as a metric for your team? How's that going for you? What I find oftentimes on Scrum Teams is that velocity metric becomes weaponized and used against us. Now, velocity, it's a vanity metric at best. Let's measure some different things. How about lead time, number of work in progress items, and cycle time? Lead time will become a primary metric for you Scrum Masters as you begin to implement Kanban. Now, number of work in progress items, that's pretty easy to track. You can track that by workflow step. How many things are you working on in each step? And how many things are you working on in total? Now, cycle time is the amount of time worked on an item in each step, and it includes wait time as well. So however long that card is in each step, that's the cycle time for each. And in theory, if you total up cycle time, it should equal lead time. These metrics Will tell you where you need to focus on to improve your flow. So for example, to reduce lead time, you should probably reduce wip. But where? I haven't the faintest idea. Take a look at your cycle time metric. This will help you figure out where things are getting hung up. Where are your cycle times starting to really get long? And then ask yourself, ask the team. Could decreasing our WIP limit or increasing our wip, changing our WIP limit, could that improve flow in this workflow step? Here's the thing to remember. Scrum Masters, use your metrics to ask good questions. Then experiment and adapt and see what that does to the metric. Many of the tools we use today will provide a cumulative flow diagram. This is going to be a wonderful tool for you to get familiar with. Scrum Masters, let's cover it here real quick. That vertical line is going to be the number of work in progress items. The horizontal line that's going to give you your cycle time. Like how long are each of these things taking as it moves through the stages and then the total time from when when it enters the system to exit the system. That's lead time. So a cumulative flow diagram can show you those three pieces of information. Scrum Masters, you'll be able to see problems using the CFD by looking for large gaps in between the workflow steps. What you should see is a nice smooth flow going from lower left to upper right when the space between the workflow steps gets wide and then gets thin and then sort of grows again. Those would be areas for you to hone in on and look and discuss with your team. The CFD is going to help you really understand flow and lead time in your system. So now it's your turn. Using the tools you have, start to investigate metrics. Can you create a cumulative flow diagram? Can you create a lead time histogram chart? Can you track cycle time? Can you report on these things? Get in your tool, Start to figure out what you can and can't do. Now, you're likely going to find that the tool doesn't do exactly what you want or doesn't display it exactly how you thought it would. Don't be discouraged. You're going to have to tune and adjust these things. I haven't seen a tool yet that out of the box does exactly what we need. So be patient. Run a few sprints watching those metrics, monitoring those metrics. So manage flow using these tools I've just given you and get radically focused on the F word.