Lean Metrics 101: What is Flow?

09/12/17 • 29 min

“Any measurement system can be gamed. However, if I had you game a system, I would want you to game it in getting things done faster” - Daniel Vacanti What is Flow? Is Flow project management just a fluke, yet another mantra in management? What are the core Lean performance metrics and what do they mean? In this episode of the Lamp, we asked Daniel Vacanti, a renown Kanban thought leader and CEO of Actionable Agile TM what Kanban Flow is and what kind of Lean metrics there are to measure it. Welcome to LAMP - Lean Agile Management Podcast, a show by Kanbanize where some of the brightest minds in Lean Agile management talk about how leaders can boost work efficiency, create a culture of high performance, and build teams that thrive. LAMP is available on YouTube and Apple Podcasts. The Show The Interview Summary In this episode of Lean Agile Management Podcast, Daniel Vacanti defines the three core metrics of Kanban: Cycle Time Throughput Work In Progress and explains how they connect to the concept of Flow and Lean project management. Below you can find some of the key points from the interview. What is Flow and what metrics can we use to measure it? Dan explains what Flow is and shows that establishing a Lean Flow creates the environment that helps us answer the two key questions of workflow management that usually disturb the peace of mind of every project manager: When will it be done? How many tasks can we get done by X date? Stop estimating. Start measuring what matters. Establishing Flow is all about building a reliable system for work processing. Establishing the Flow is the key to being able to give a statistically significant answer to the two questions above. With Flow metrics, you don’t need to guess or estimate when work on a project will be done. The Flow metrics give you hard data on the productivity, efficiency, and reliability of your production process. Lean manufacturing metrics are just as relevant for knowledge work Some managers dismiss cycle time, throughput and WIP, the Lean metrics that stand behind the idea of Flow in Kanban, because of their origins in the manufacturing industry. They say these Lean metrics are not suitable for modern knowledge work environment. However, Dan Vacanti insists that managing Kanban flow is about delivering value. The Lean metrics help you capture the health of that process, and that is relevant in every context. These metrics serve 2 purposes and both are universally valuable: Track the health of the process Establish predictability of the process Analysing cycle time, throughput and WIP data of your workflow set the foundation for measuring the efficiency of our workflow. Having this data, you can clearly say how much time work items spend in your production process and looking deeper into that, you can learn even more. What is causing bottlenecks in the workflow and where do we waste time? These are the questions you’ll be able to answer. The dangers of concentrating on just one metric of Flow You get what you measure, so be careful not to put too much stress on any one metric. Getting the wrong stuff faster doesn’t help. Don’t optimize your workflow for just one metric and don’t set just one metric of operational level as a key KPI. Even more importantly, Lean Flow metrics are not to be used for sub-optimizing for individual performance. That has a negative impact on both the process and employee morale. Instead, make sure every measurement of success in your workflow contributes towards the answer to this question: what is the main problem that we are trying to solve? Flow thinking is all about the value. Common mistakes and misinterpretations of Flow management. Not understanding the impact of WIP management on Flow Capacity utilization - using up 100% of capacity is counterproductive, despite common thinking Counterintuitive measures - in order to get more stuff done, you need to work on less

Previous Episode

Fixing Team Issues With Continuous Improvement

Welcome to Lean Agile Management Podcast - a place where we talk with the thought leaders and top-tier management consultants about Lean Agile transformation, answer manager’s questions and discuss the hottest topics in management & productivity. Welcome to the LAMP! Are you tired of putting out the fires of your team issues just to see them cycle back? If so, you might be extinguishing the symptoms instead of eliminating the root cause of your problems. Today we will shine the light on building and sustaining the culture of the continuous improvement process and how this key concept of Lean philosophy can help you solve the team management issues. We are joined today by a professional Lean coach, developer of Kanban foundation courses, and a certified service management consultant, Robert Falkowitz. Today he is tuning in from Switzerland to talk with us about continuous improvement in the context of team management. Skip to Comments > Video Transcript: D: Hi Robert, welcome to the show! R: Hi Dima, thanks for inviting me. How are you today? D: I’m doing great, how are you? R: Good, very well. D: I’m glad you could make it, thanks for tuning in today. R: It’s my pleasure. D: So I know you have really serious experience helping teams understand and implement Lean and Kanban, you’ve worked with countless teams in different industries but why did you decide to coach Lean in the first place? Could we start there? R: Before I got involved in Lean and Kanban in a very serious way, I did a lot of work in Service Management. What I’ve found and what most people in the field find is that it’s very difficult to justify the effort that you put into the improving the way in which you manage services. And I found that the reason for this was that most organizations have problems in the way in which they deliver and manage services; not because of the Service Management aspect but because of something much more fundamental: how their teams are organized and how they manage their work, how they manage the flow of work or don’t manage the flow of work, for that matter. R: And so, I said, in order to be able to help my customers better, it was important to help them improve where you could make most noticeable improvements and then afterward we can come back and fine-tune it with Service Management improvements. And that’s how I got started with Lean and Kanban. D: Would you say there are some general patterns or issues in the way we think about team management that the teams you’ve been working with could share? R: You know, there are a lot of differences from one sector to another sector, especially in terms of regulatory requirements. There will be differences in terms of the size of the organization, whether they are located at one site or multiple sites. There are differences in terms of the background, the culture of the organization and how it works. So every case is somewhat different and you have to be agile in adapting to services that you provide in order to help organizations do a better job at doing their work. D: Would you say that there are some biggest ultimate roadblocks or productivity myths that specifically prevent teams from becoming a high performing team? Well, what I’ve found is when organizations try to improve the way in which they work by layering on more controls, what they’re doing is fact, very frequently, exactly the opposite of what they intend to do. Now, it is difficult because people have grown up in believing that the best way to improve the way in which they work is to manage better, to check up more, to control more, to have better reports and to be able to act better on those reports in order to make decisions. And very frequently this is exactly the opposite of what the organizations need to do. So you’ve got this big change in the mentality of people, trying to get them to think in terms of doing less in order to improve the way in which they perform, rather than doing more.

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What is Agile Marketing?

“We want to create an organization where marketers are proud to work, where they know they can get things done” - Yuval Yeret Who is Agile Marketing for? How does it look like and what are the business benefits of an Agile marketing team? Today we discuss these questions with one of the thought leaders driving this change - Yuval Yeret, the CTO of Agile Sparks. Welcome to LAMP – Lean Agile Management Podcast, a show by Kanbanize where some of the brightest minds in Lean Agile management talk about how leaders can boost work efficiency, create a culture of high performance, and build teams that thrive. LAMP is available on YouTube and Apple Podcasts. The Interview Summary In this episode of Lean Agile Management Podcast, Yuval Yeret explains what Agile Marketing is and what it is not. He reveals the problems of the traditional approach to marketing and shows how you can set your team on the path to Agile avoiding the most common mistakes. We got the answers to these questions: What are the first steps in getting started with Agile Marketing? What would an Agile Marketing look like? What would the team operate like? What are the short and long-term benefits of a genuine Agile transformation? Debunking the Agile Marketing Myths: To better understand this marketing philosophy, we started with debunking the myths and replacing them with the truths about what really makes a marketing team Agile. Agile marketing is NOT just: Fast marketing - it’s more than just doing things quickly, there shouldn’t be trade-offs Reacting Issuing a tweet the minute something happens Agile marketing IS about Recognising the uncertainty of marketing environment, methods, and tools Thinking about your marketing in terms of hypotheses that need to be validated Data-driven marketing worldview Iteration, adaptation, fast learning, collaboration across organization Thinking in terms of customer journey, not just in narrow stages Do we really need Agile Marketing? What’s wrong with the traditional marketing? If the burnt out marketers who try to juggle too many things without any significant outcome is what we want, then we are good as we are. The catastrophic lack of collaboration between silos, long chains of approvals and heavyweight plans that never really get executes are not all that uncommon too. The “Big-bang” mentality means marketers spend weeks, months working on things that shouldn’t have been started in the first place. Way too often projects are dead on arrival - outdated, clanky and irrelevant to the market by the time they reach it. The Agile marketing experiment Yuval described a real-life 6-week experiment that he helped run where Agile marketers had to compete against the traditional marketing team in launching a product campaign. In 6 weeks, one team got a campaign in the air that they could start tweaking, while another team was still trying to decide what to do. Can you guess which one was first? What are Agile marketers like? “I want everyone in my organization to be a mini-CMO” Agile marketers think through the buyer’s journey as the whole not just about their smaller part of it alone. They take the direction and then act autonomously to get there. How does planning work in Agile Marketing? Is Agile Marketing about ditching the plan for the sake of agility? The opposite is true. You plan much more in Agile. In fact, Agile Marketing is about continuous planning. Depending on the approach you take, you would have daily planning for short-term initiatives, plan every 2 weeks, have an ongoing planning effort or a cadence-based planning. If you do agile marketing well, it’s a very disciplined and a very mature Marketing OS, it’s not chaos. What are the most common sins of fake Agile in marketing? A successful Agile transformation means a quality change, not just acceptance of a set of practices, mixing up a few principles and changing a few names. Yuval takes us through the most common mistakes people m...