Blogs

Optimising software delivery is essential in today’s rapidly-evolving tech landscape and by using flow metrics to optimise software delivery, you can elevate the efficiency of your delivery pipeline. This article breaks down key flow metrics that streamline processes, reduce waste, and speed up delivery, so you can expect practical steps to implement these metrics for measurable improvements in your software delivery strategy.

If you want to reach higher levels of Agile maturity, it is important to identify and address the underlying issues that may be hindering your progress. Applying objective value-based metrics, Flow Load and Flow Predictability enable continuous improvement every quarter. Using Flow Metrics across the organisation has become nearly synonymous with Agile Ways of Working and SAFe. Provided with good aggregate data from across teams showing Program or Portfolio progress, business owners, Lean-Agile Leaders, Product Managers/Owners, System Architects and Release Train Engineers can have wonderfully compelling conversations.

Read on these real-world use cases on how Flomatika has helped customers gain significant delivery performance improvements. Included are dashboards, charts and metrics that depict the performance gains of the team over time.

Value Stream Managers have the end to end accountability across the entire Value Stream. The ensure the work efficiently flows through the Value Stream as well as managing the dependencies between the segments. They also need to have a strong understanding of their customer and their needs, to then be able to ensure that the Value Stream is effectively fulfilling these needs. Combined they are ensuring their Value Stream is fit for purpose.

Service Request Managers are focused on doing the right things, and maximising effectiveness, not efficiency. They consolidate all the various demands and factors that go into sequencing the work in a pull based system and communicating back to stakeholders. They see the bigger picture, but always look for the next right thing to do through brutal prioritisation.

Service Delivery Managers are responsible for how the work flows efficiently through the system and that the service is satisfactory delivered to customers. They focus on doing things right and process efficiency. They bring data into the conversation, it's about the work flowing through the system and not about the individuals.

Feature show case on the ability to look at Flow Analytics through the lens of your Obeya. The Fitness Criteria is available at the bottom of your Obeya, but you can also click through to access the full capability of the Analytics Dashboard viewed through the context of your Obeya.

Service Delivery Review is assessing the performance of the service being provided against a set of measures. Things like Lead Time, Quality, Customer Satisfaction, Fitness Level and so on. It’s a focus on how the work is flowing through the value stream. The key is that data is brought in to have an informed view on these measures.

We see too often the allure of building your own analytics platform, and it typically ends in some level of disappointment. Let’s talk about and break down both the perceived benefits of building your own platform, and then the advantages of subscribing to a platform similar to Flomatika.

We’ve introduced a new feature called ‘drill down’ to guide users on what they should look at next to conduct deeper levels of analysis. Here is a showcase of what the feature looks like and how to use it.

Scatter plots allow for detailed analysis to be conducted, however sometimes when viewed from a zoomed out perspective, they can tell a story from the pattern that emerges. Here are some examples of how scatter plots are able to tell a story.

This is Flomatika's take on Lean's ‘7 forms of waste’. However we have applied it to knowledge work, as opposed to manufacturing. We go through in detail the different forms and why they are important.

It’s important to see and understand how the work flows through your system. Whether that is your upstream funnel, (downstream) delivery system, your end-to-end value stream, or perhaps it’s a particular value stream segment. It’s important to visualise and understand your key flow metrics to identify the areas that are not in the desired state that need to be addressed. Flomatika helps you visualise and understand how the work flows through your system, and highlights the areas of concern you should focus on.

Flomatika Smart Board enables you to filter by the different concerns that you may have around your delivery system. Such as Blocked, Stale, Above SLE, Expedited, Unassigned and Delayed Items.

By having visibility of your WIP Age % in comparison with your Service Level Expectation, teams can make some better informed day-to-day decisions.

Here is a list of the different types of ‘views’ for you to consider. What is it that is impacting your teams, and if you could categorise and visualise, you’ll be armed with the knowledge to take action.

How is our investment across these teams being utilised across the different demands? Are they working on the right things? Or is there some factor that is pulling them into other demands?

When talking about Lead Time predictability, we’re essentially looking to see if there's a high or low variance in how long it’ll take for a delivery system to deliver on a piece of work. Let's deep dive in more detail and see what we can discover.

Running a Service Delivery Review using Flomatika. Today’s focus is on ‘Speed’. This is the delivery Lead Time from when the team starts a piece of work to when it is moved to Done. We’re also going to be looking at how the team is meeting their customer’s service level expectations (SLE).

There are some things to watch out for when measuring value. The first and most important is to beware of single metrics. Measuring one thing almost never gives an accurate measurement of the real value of something. You need a suite of measures to tell the whole story. If you measured someone on just typing speed you would encourage fast but very inaccurate typing (much like mine). You need to measure both speed and accuracy to get a true picture. Likewise just measuring new customer acquisition isn’t a full picture – are you attracting them by giving away a lot of introductory offers – what’s your cost of acquisition? Are they profitable customers or are they low value and high maintenance?

In most organisations, the only funding model available for non-Opex work is the project. Capex work = project. This leads to quite a few well-known problems. Having to continually stand up new project teams and then break up those successful teams once the work is done. The overhead of having to go through a project approval process, which because it is asking for money, is often long and onerous which limits the organisation’s ability to stand up important pieces of work quickly.

Last time, we looked at why the old pattern of business and IT as separate entities is no longer appropriate for organisations today. We saw how separating IT and business leads to inefficiencies and delays in delivering value for business and customers/clients. IT no longer supports the business. IT is the business.The alternative to separate business, and Its structures is to combine the two – take all the technology functions that the business relies on to operate and give control of them directly to the business. What remains – those systems that support the business (payroll/accounting/etc) stay with a much reduced IT department, which reverts to a support function as it was originally intended. In this article, we are going to look in more detail at how these new business technology functions should be organised. Traditionally, IT departments tend to be organised either functionally – developers in one group, testers in another, BAs in their own group and so on; or organised by system – everyone who works on the accounting system in one group, those working on the website in another.

While the idea of an IT department feels quite modern, the actual idea is pretty old. Since the 60s and 70s, organisations have been using computers to do some of their back-office tasks - accounting, payroll, transaction recording, stock control. That sort of thing. These systems were big, complex, usually ran on mainframes, and were generally considered support systems for the business. These systems needed people to operate, upgrade and maintain them so rather than have these support functions in the business, just like we did for other support functions, an IT department was created as a cost centre to house them.

This blog describes the ten most common challenges I hear from business and tech leaders working in enterprise organisations worldwide through my role at Flomatika. It becomes clear that the most wicked challenges they face are common across countries, industries and domains. I believe that expanded awareness and understanding of these archetypal problems are vitally important in the work of transformation. The habits of our culture and ways of working can be challenged more effectively when we see them occurring. Analysing past behaviour is helpful, but it is not as powerful as observing the systemic behaviours in the present moment.

Continuing our conversation of visibility on the concerns related to initiatives, this time, we are talking about how you can view progress from several dimensions across initiatives. With Governance Obeya, progress can be viewed at various levels: Overall Progress of the Obeya; Progress toward each Key Result; Progress made by each Team and Individual contributor; Progress of work as an infographic in a Kanban view; Remaining work as a burn-up / burn-down chart.

Many might agree, it is good practice to identify and continually manage both risks and dependencies across the life of a program or initiative. Usually, they are documented in various methods and stored in disparate locations. Be it spreadsheets in a folder buried deep on a shared network; in a PPM tool which only a few team members have access to; or it may be recorded in a work management system which is difficult for your stakeholders to access. The problem is, information remains fragmented across various systems making it difficult for teams and stakeholders to have visibility to the information. We want to make this information more easily accessible, by bringing just the relevant Risk, Dependencies and other concerns of an initiative in one single view within an Obeya. ‍

Our flagship feature Governance Obeya addresses the problem around lack of visibility (know more about it from our blog). Each widget on the Obeya represents a concern you might have. The Objectives widget provides visibility on the progress of delivery towards business goals. The goal setting framework called Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) has been gaining popularity as it encourages organisations to define actionable goals and track measurable outcomes. Our widget is loosely structured around that concept, but you don’t need to be using OKRs yourself to take advantage.

Governance Obeya is one of the flagship feature sets of Flomatika. The vision is to address the ‘visibility’ problem faced by many enterprises around their Initiatives. What do we mean by ‘Initiatives’? They come in several forms and have different names in different organisations, but ultimately they are a timebox with a scope of work to be delivered. They can be:Projects focused on a set of deliverablesProgram Increments, or Quarterly Plans to achieve a set of outcomesInitiatives with Mission Teams formed to achieve a specific objective or outcomeIt can be a team working within a Sprint to achieve a goalOr anything in between

These items are part of the series of metrics that we consider as part of Delivery Governance. Indicators around the health of your delivery system. Commitment Rate and Time to Commit help to understand the flow of your demands. % Stale Work, Flow Debt and Discarded Items help to identify sources of delay and waste in your Value Stream or Delivery System.

Should Delayed Items be considered in WIP or Inventory?Now that we’ve covered some of the concepts, the question is: “Should we be displaying Delayed Items as WIP?”These items have a commitment date, so by definition should be shown along with all the other WIP items. These items are ageing, a customer expectation has been set, and they are now waiting for the work item to be delivered. Teams should be conscious of these Delayed Items and they should have a plan in place on how they are going to manage these. 

Another reason why high predictability is desired is the fact that if you were utilising predictive forecasting techniques, such as Monte Carlo simulation, there will be less variance in your forecast, giving you higher confidence. If your teams have low predictability, you’ll find higher variance in your forecast, which would result in lower confidence in your ability to hit the target date.

At Flomatika, we had been using a basic cumulative flow diagram to observe our delivery flow. But as our team grew and processes scaled, we had a hard time extracting insights comprehensively. It was also especially challenging to spot a problematic workflow stage that’s lost among multiple workflows. It was then that we realized that it’s time we give it some Flomatika spin.

Sensing complex adaptive systems such as Value Streams can be tricky. There is an endless number of metrics you could use to get a sense of how a Value Stream is operating. Using too many metrics creates noise, which distracts you. Using too little, you might miss critical health indicators. Below are the customer-centric and flow-based metrics we believe to be useful at a higher level of analysis.

The daily course of a Value Stream operation can be a bit messier than what we expect. While producing new value for customers and stakeholders, Value Streams need to stop here and there to fix unplanned defects and incidents, refactor existing areas of products to improve maintainability, evolve infrastructure capabilities, improve performance, execute security and compliance requirements, and provide support to functional areas.

Value Streams are defined by the constant flow of requests and deliveries of customer and stakeholder requests. As a rule of thumb, the customer is the one who requests and receives the value produced. Stakeholders, on the other hand, are parties with interest in either the production process or the value produced. Anyone that can either affect or be affected by a Value Stream.

Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD) is a data tool that visually presents the “flow” of tasks from one state to another. It also shows the pace of your tasks’ delivery and helps analyse process stability. The vertical axis or the Y-axis represents the number of work items, whereas the time is plotted on the horizontal axis or the X-axis. The colourful bands represent different workflow stages and their size indicates the number of items moving through various states before being completed. Ideally, the bands should be rising together and in parallel to each other.

The concept of Value Streams is over a century old. Probably, most notoriously dating back to Ford’s Model T assembly line in 1913, when the time required to assemble one vehicle was reduced from over 12 hours down to just 93 minutes. The cost ended up going down from the original $825 to $260 despite high inflation at the time. Ford’s mass production system came with a catch, however. He had a famous saying: "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants, so long as it is black." Unfortunately, such a mass production system wouldn’t work later for Toyota. 

Value Stream Management (VSM) is the process of understanding the criteria that makes your product or service relevant to your customers and stakeholders, and ensuring your service level continues to fall within acceptable customer thresholds where you are considered to be fit for purpose.Put simply, VSM is all about maintaining fitness in the presence of a rapidly changing external environment. After reading this article, we hope that you can start seeing Value Streams where you could only see companies, divisions, teams, and individual contributors before.

If you’ve spent some time thinking about performance metrics and analytics, a lot of what we have included in Flomatika might already be familiar to you: Lead Time, Throughput, WIP. These are quite commonly used in the industry with lots of tools and plugins out there showing these, and some do quite a good job.One of our aspirations here at Flomatika is to build a best-of-breed Analytics Dashboard. In the pursuit of this, we asked ourselves what are some analytics we could introduce that would really make a difference in how we approach delivery performance? The data already resides in your work management system. It was a matter of slicing it and presenting it in a way that you could gain some additional insights. 

So if we need to adapt to a new agile framework, where do we start? The good news is that we can use agile delivery processes to provide a solution. The Agile tools, processes, and ceremonies these teams use are designed to natively provide visibility, transparency, and are actually designed specifically to allow for change which makes them natively set up for governance. In fact, they give you an even better end-to-end and closer to a real-time view of your value delivery at a lower overhead and cost.

A key element of any system implementation and agile transformation is the ability to track Service Delivery Performance metrics. This enables you to demonstrate the impact of the changes you are bringing to the ecosystem, with a customer perspective.

This month the inaugural edition of the State of Value Stream Management Report was released, a significant piece of research produced by the VSM Consortium. The report identifies four practices and key findings. They are: Organising around Value StreamsDiscovery through Value Stream MappingInspection and Adaptation Through Value Flow AnalysisMeasuring and Acting on Value Realisation.

This last week was the release of the first State of Value Stream Management Report, which, among other things, provides a how-to guide on implementing digital value streams. One point the report makes is that organisations often believe they are not mature enough for value stream management. In my experience over the past several years working with organisations to optimise their value streams, I find this to be true, but it need not be a blocker.