Has your organisation defined categories of Flow to allow for visibility of the type of work moving through your system? If so what are they?
Enterprise Agility not only requires organisations to have the information available to know when to pivot but also to focus on optimising the Flow of value through their teams to their customers as early as possible. However value isn’t just ‘new customer features’ as organisations do need to invest our time into things like security or compliance plus the future ability for us to release value quickly by reducing Tech Debt for example.
Mik Kersten’s book “Project to Product” outlines four categories of Flow which can be used to not only track velocity of the flow of value but for leaders to be able to make trade off decisions on where to focus the organisations teams – for example do they ask the teams to focus more on quality for the next few sprints (too many bugs in the software) or more on Risks (security, governance & Compliance) if the organisation or industry is has decided this is required.
These categories succinctly summarise the different areas required to focus on, which once implemented result in visibility of why teams often don’t have as much capacity to deliver new business value as the business things but what it does is allow the organisation to make informed decisions on where to focus whilst also ensuring bottle necks to flow can be identified and removed.
