The Flow Doctor Will See You Now

Every large organization needs a Flow Practice to improve the rate of business value delivery through your product value streams, and to implement many of the great ideas that have inspired you throughout this conference.


During this session, you'll learn how two experiences flow doctors identify and remedy three common maladies seen as part of a Flow Practice on the journey of value stream management in software delivery.


-Common Ailment: “Ever Increasing Treadmill-itis” - having too much work in progress “WIP” has way more negative impact on your flow that many realize and yet it is one of the most common recurring ailments seen.

-Chronic Condition: “If I Just Stop Looking, Is it Gone Syndrome” - addressing delays and bottlenecks is never easy, but ignoring them is even worse.

-Fatal Disease: “Death by 1000 Debts and Risks” - lack of visibility into debt and risk flow items is guaranteed to plague your organization in ways that can be irrecoverable if not properly addressed.


In addition, you’ll hear the flow doctors discuss the reality of referred pain (when business results are not tied to flow improvements), how to recognize patterns of areas of concern and how to determine hotspots in your flow. Join this session to learn from two experienced Flow Doctors how you, as a Flow Doctor, can gain the support of your executives and business partners, while guiding teams on a successful journey of value stream management.


This session presented by Tasktop.

NB

Nicole Bryan

Chief Product Officer, Tasktop

KC

Katherine Chajke

Lead Agile Trainer, TIAA

CD

Carmen DeArdo

Principal Flow Advisor, Tasktop

Transcript

00:00:06

Hello, does community and super excited to be here to talk about the flow doctor will see you now. Um, I'm delighted to be here with, um, Kate. Okay. Help me with your last name.

00:00:19

Cheika

00:00:20

And Carmen Diardo. Um, Kate, why don't you introduce yourself?

00:00:24

Yeah, so I'm so glad to be here. So I'm Kate Cheika and I'm an agile trainer practitioner coach, um, for the last 15, 20 years, a pretty extensive background in software engineering. And now I get to talk a lot about my favorite topic flow

00:00:42

And Carmen.

00:00:44

Hi, I'm glad to be here. Carmen. Diardo I'm a principal float advisor, uh, at Tasktop and I help customers, um, try to understand, improve their flow so they can deliver, uh, business results more quickly for their customers.

00:01:00

Fabulous. I'm Nicole Bryan. I'm a chief product officer at Tasktop technologies. So with that, um, I'm going to share my screen, Kate Carmen, are we seeing the right screen?

00:01:18

Fabulous. So today we're here to talk to you about, um, the flow doctor will see you now. Um, we've already introduced ourselves, so we'll skip this five. So you might wonder why I showing a picture of, uh, the fabulous show from the eighties, ER, um, but it's really because we believe that learning to practice value stream management with the flow metrics, um, really requires a team of people that can help you identify and remedy the myriad of ailments and problems. Um, that you'll be that you'll uncover as you begin to think and manage from the perspective of flow. And so we believe that large organizations should think of starting a flow practice, um, and say I'm lucky enough to have two flow doctors with me here. Um, and I think Kate even has her stethoscope. Um, there you go. Uh, so Kate and Carmen are here, um, to, um, uh, talk us through their experiences with different ailments and different, um, common problems that you see when managing from flow.

00:02:22

I'm just going to do a quick walkthrough about the, the core flow metrics, um, and really, uh, to, to keep with the healthcare analogy. Uh, we really think of the flow metrics as the same as the vital signs of the human body. So every time you go to the doctor, there's a common set of things that will be checked, your temperature, your heart rate, your blood pressure and flow metrics really represent the same that any organization, regardless of what type of software you're building, um, you really should be measuring these glow metrics, flow, velocity flow efficiency, flow time flow, and flow distribution. Um, so just quickly flow velocity is really about how, how much value is being delivered within a reporting period flow distribution. Am I putting the right capacity towards features, risk debt and defects and Kate and Carmen? I think I talk quite a bit about that, um, flow load, our team's thrashing because incomings far outweigh your capacity to, to deliver, um, flow time and flow efficiency. How much time elapses from request to release and are my, uh, processes causing teams to have to wait on work for significant periods of time. So these core flow metrics are what we believe on can really help an organization in their float practice. Um, and, uh, what can really guide your organization for improvement

00:04:02

Um, so our first ailments, a common aliens, the ever increasing trend mellitus, otherwise known as too much width. Um, so flow doctors I'll, I'll let you take it from here.

00:04:21

Okay. Thanks Nicole. So, you know, I think one of the common elements is Nicole described is we see teams where their characteristics are, their flow load is increasing. Um, their flow time is also increasing. So the amount of time it's taken to finish work is increasing. And a lot of times we also see the light, the light green color, which is the wait time. So it's not uncommon to see that wait time increasing, which means work is waiting longer before someone can actually work on it. And consequently, we see the flow velocity decreasing. So, Kay, talk a little about, you know, as you're working with teams and you start to see this, um, how you detect that and see what kind of things do you prescribe as a flow doctor when you see this condition?

00:05:14

Yeah. Yeah. So one of the big things we focus on is we'll always be saying, stop starting and start finishing. So it's really easy as we start to see that work in process or that flow load increasing to keep an eye on, like you said, Carmen, the velocity may decrease the flow time is going to increase. Uh, so it's a huge mental model shift because we think, you know, staying busy is leading to our productivity. If some work gets blocked, we pull more work in and that's very natural for us. And it feels like the right thing to do. It feels good to start work. Starting work is easy. Finishing work is hard. Uh, so that's the first thing we start to look at typically such a low hanging fruit for teams to start with is look at that flow load. And when we compare it to the velocity, if we have way more work, way more load than what the velocity size that we can complete, uh, we encourage the teams to maybe form an experiment. What if we took on a little bit less work? What if we started focus on completing work rather than keep pulling in work? Uh, so that's, uh, that's a huge shift when we first start looking at this with teams.

00:06:30

I mean, I think that's a great point Kaden. And sometimes I think what we've seen is, you know, certain work becomes neglected. So, so what happens is it's almost like, you know, in a pond where you only have a current of work that's moving and then you have work that's kind of in a still water. So it appears to be in progress, but really it's not. And is that something that you've encountered a lot and had?

00:06:57

Oh yeah. Yep. So this is really important. Start out the time period, whether you're sprinting or following another, uh, methodology or method. Um, and then something really urgent comes in. Right. Maybe you have, I apologize if we can pause here, my dogs just busted it in. I'm so sorry. Let me go. No problem.

00:07:27

Yeah. So Carmen, uh, we certainly see as, you know, had work that was really a priority, uh, for one or multiple of our customers at the time. Right. That's why we pulled it in. It was a priority and then it's pretty common. We'll have another really urgent request come in. That needs to be expedited. Uh, certainly maybe we have some production incidents or defects, those become priority. Number one, and then somebody taps us on the shoulder. Hey, you know, I just, just need this one little thing. Right? All these things start to come in. And like you were saying, it basically stagnates. So are we saying these customers aren't important anymore? Are these needs not important? How did we have all these priorities? And then all of a sudden, you know, everything else was a higher priority than that. Uh, so certainly we see that effect,

00:08:19

Right. And then, you know, that creates a lot of either work being neglected, you know, increases the cognitive load on your team and may have more context switching. And so we all know that men only when we have a lot of things on our mind or even in the back of our mind of things that, yeah. You know, I know I'm supposed to be getting to that. And customer's like, where's my thing. Where's my thing that, that keeps, you know, taking away bandwidth capacity from the team that to start to finish things.

00:08:50

Yeah. A lot of times we talk about the operational flow, but also that psychological flow, right. Being able to sit and focus for a couple minutes, you know, creative, uh, you know, certainly give our capacity to solving the problems in an elegant, you know, kind of graceful way. Um, we've, we've become so used to interruptions and disruptions. Uh, so certainly like that, that it can, can actually hurt kind of our delivery. Yeah. So definitely something we keep an eye on.

00:09:19

Great. So, um, let's talk about our next, our next, um, disease. Um, it criticize one is a chronic condition, um, and it is called if I just stopped looking, is it gone syndrome?

00:09:39

Yeah. So I think a lot of times where we, we get into this situation where we're experiencing things or kind of accepting it. And so what we're seeing here is, you know, kind of an erratic velocity and load and, and wait times that are building, and then do we really understand what's happening here? Are we really trying to understand what's causing what we're seeing? Um, and it really gets into, do we, do we actually know? And if we make visible what our bottlenecks are. So a lot of times they're great ideas. There was a whole set of dev ops practices on how to improve things, but do we know what practice to play at the right time based on what's actually getting in our way? Um, so how do you, what do you see this in operation, Kate as you're teaching?

00:10:32

Yeah, so, you know, I see a lot of times it is, you know, we're looking at where can we focus our time and money for the best improvement, right? So if we take a scattershot approach, we may be spending a lot of time and money solving the wrong problem. Um, and then our gut feel maybe that, oh, this certain area is always the problem. Whether it's waiting for approval or waiting on QA or waiting for this or waiting for that. Um, and does it change over time? And, you know, we talk about, uh, you know, in scrum we have the scrum master, they're looking at impediments or different things like that. Um, but until we really look at the data and look over it, you know, historically where our bottlenecks kind of what's that high water mark, where do we frequently see, uh, that we're spending time on these delays?

00:11:20

Uh, they've always been there and we've become somewhat numb to them. So putting them kind of front and center and saying, you know, we have a lot of this waste work smarter, not harder. We could spend all this money trying to work faster, but when our time to market is mostly spent in wait states and delays, that's very, eye-opening, um, we're talking, you know, we're probably, you know, maybe 5% maybe at most 15%, uh, process efficient in many areas from, from everything I hear. Uh, so really taking the time to look at where these bottlenecks are, uh, you know, and being able to address the real root cause of the problems, removing those delays, removing that waste, uh, and kind of buying ourselves kind of that sanity back, like we're saying, we're so overburdened so much work in process. So many disruptions and just really start to get this flow going. Um, and when we look at some of the graphs and the distribution, when I talk about flow, we see a lot of peaks and valleys and graphs sometimes due to these bottlenecks, all the work piling up and how can we start to smooth that out and improve, uh, improve our flow visual,

00:12:33

Right? You know, if you go to Gamba and you, and you observe a team, the team's always going to be busy we're so we're not really talking about the team being B we're waiting, it's the work that way it's in the work and, you know, and in it and creative work, it's hard to see it's all like a factory where you can go up to the fourth floor and look down and you see an inventory, you know, where is the inventory? Where are the things that are piling up? And then, and as you said, it may not necessarily be, you know, in CIC D it might be to the left of that, right. It might be teams waiting for work to flow from the business. Um, I know we've had experiences where half the time and money was spent before something even gotten to the backlog of a team. And yet there was no attention being paid to that part of the value stream or downstream, as you said, waiting for review, waiting for a change approval, you know, waiting for something after the set of iterations. And, and yet a lot of times it's like, well, we, you know, we got to get better at CIC D well, obviously that's kind of table stakes, but is that really the impediment you have? And if you don't know it, how do you know what you're doing is actually going to fit?

00:13:46

And here, I mean, here's one example that's so, um, not to trivialize things, but, you know, there's really no cost to fix. We found in some cases waiting for product owner approval, right. We didn't even know, we didn't assume it was a problem. Well, we sent them an email or, you know, they'll check the tool or we'll get ahold of them or certain things like that. So in a lot of cases, it's not these, you know, huge, expensive changes. It's sometimes just changing a little bit how we work together, um, which is, which is nice, the needs.

00:14:16

I actually noticed that a lot of times, uh, just the conversation and acknowledging the, the, the fact that there are wait spades, and oftentimes hearing customers talk about this, like debate within themselves. Like, is that an active state? Cause I think that's a wait statement, which I think is really interesting because it just kind of brings to the forefront. Carmen, you can, you can talk endlessly about, I often think of Carmen as the chief therapy officer of, cause it's like, hold on, let's just talk the wait states and the active states. Um, I think that is a lot of it is therapeutic for people to just be able to see it in that with their own eyes, um, and address it.

00:15:03

That's it taking control of it too. That's very empowering. If we have more control, uh, you know, then we think,

00:15:11

Yeah, it's really D Nicole K directing those conversations. I mean, the value really happens. The data is you need the data to get the focus, but then it, it dressing the points that come up in those conversations and being able to have the right conversations is where the value then comes out of, okay, what can we do? And then she, you know, you're going through that plan, do check act continuous improvement, did it actually help it? And now you actually have data to say it did. And you know, these are the consequences or then right, our intuition, maybe wasn't on. So let's try something else, but it gets you out of this guessing. And as Kate said, it's much more empowering for the team to be able to have that, have the data and be able to try things to improve.

00:15:58

Yeah. And a lot of times we feel, you know, we talk a lot about intuition. We feel things are a certain way and it's actually time and time again, um, has been very eye-opening once we look at the data to really realign and readjust, uh, you know, we're thinking things are over here and they're way over here. So just being able to continue to align and, and build that new intuition around around flow is huge. It takes the discussion.

00:16:24

Fabulous. So, uh, let's move on to, um, who fatal disease, uh, death by a thousand debts and risks Carmen over to you.

00:16:40

Sure. Nicole. So, you know, I think a lot of times what we see is if you look at the flow distribution, you know, in the right hand, top right hand corner there, you'll see a lot of red and green, which represents the features and the defects. So in this case, you see there's a very small amount, you know, 30% of what the team's actually delivering is feature work. And almost 70% is defects and very little investment in risk or debt. So, so I look at the four flow metrics in the sense of revenue, generation and revenue protection and features are what people think about for revenue generation defects or protecting your revenue. But then there's also risks, which are protecting revenue, because we know that if you have a risk in production, that's going to hurt your reputation as a company, there's compliance issues. But then that is an investment in future revenue generation.

00:17:39

And, and so when you see a picture like this, what you see is, you know, is this going down that debt spiral, where, where, because you're not investing in debt, you have a fragile code base. You know, a lot of defects you're spending a lot of time on defects, gives you a lot less time to focus on features. And then if you look at flow time, what you see is the flow time for features is getting longer and longer. So this can become a fatal disease. If you don't understand it and then say, stop the presses, we need to start focusing on debt, you know, so that we can actually clean things up so that we can then go faster again. So, Kay. How do you, how do you deal with this as you're coaching?

00:18:22

Yeah, so, I mean, this is such a, what I find is this is such a hidden condition, right? Uh, so a lot of times, you know, when we talk about risk, uh, you know, security, compliance regulations, all sorts of really critical things, um, that aren't typically visible until there is a problem and we have to react to it and they could be significant problems. Uh, so here we're talking about making it visual, being proactive about it, again, that empowerment actually being in control, uh, planning for it, keeping it visual, having those conversations so that, you know, Carmen, as you say, we don't get into this debt spiral because it's really hard to get out of. And by having that discussion again, just making it visible, being able to talk about it, plan for it. You know, you have the different, um, maturities that your different products might be in.

00:19:17

So they might have different, you know, distributions for how much, uh, feature work is healthy, that risk defects, um, having those right conversations, putting yourself back in the driver's seat for it. And, um, it can, it can lead to a lot of conversations before the problem occurs rather than after. And you know, a lot of the times, the way we introduce this is when you ha go on a shopping spree, right? With your credit card, a high interest credit card is we all love to shop it's, you know, paying down the debt that if you don't get ahead of it, uh, especially with this high interest, it can, it can really take control of you. Uh, so you get in control of it rather than it taking control of you is usually how we, we start to look at this debt and risk. Uh, the other really common thing that is interesting that I hear time and time again, I hear this almost every session.

00:20:08

Uh, when I talk about technical debt or risk with teams is, well, the business would never want the business doesn't want to pay for that. They only want to pay for features. And what we started to see is they're paying, they're paying a lot more by not addressing it than they would by proactively addressing it. So I try to sort out that, you know, we have to be careful with that concern because if it's hidden and we're charging them for it anyways, wouldn't it be better to be visible and actually they have control over it, uh, and ended up spending less in the long run on technical debt risks or, uh, those deaths, like you said,

00:20:45

I think Kate, that last point you made is so critical about that the business needs to understand debt and risk matter. And if they make it visible to them, it increases their understanding that this is something that it's okay to focus on. I feel like a lot of teams have historically felt they aren't allowed to focus on debt and risk and making it visible, I think helps them. Carmen, you probably have a lot of experience with that as well.

00:21:14

Well, absolutely. And, and, you know, we haven't talked that much yet about the business results, but, but we know the happiness of the team. You know, a lot of, there's a lot of emphasis now on engagement and happiness of the team. And if you see a team that's happy, they're productive and productive teams are typically happy. And if you, if you're working in a situation where, you know, well, gee, if I could just refactor this code base, we just upgraded this latest library. If we just did a few things, maybe improve the process, you know, improved implement one of the dev ops processes. It would improve our ability to go faster, right? It, it, when you can't do that, you know, it, it hurts the team morale and nobody wants to work in a place where they feel like, well, if I'm introducing a lot of code changes, what am I going to see? Well, I'm going to see a lot of the defects that we see here. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of synergies here to, you know, the team feeling that empower and feeling that the ability to pay down the debt to do things that inherently they know are the right things to do, and then see that result in increased satisfaction and delivery capability for their customers.

00:22:28

Yeah. And that's, I really want to piggyback on that. Uh, Carmen is, you know, looking at these in conjunction is if you have a team with a really high velocity, I it's just going through the roof and we're see that they're not paying down their risk and their technical debt. It's almost like a false velocity. Cause you know, you're kind of heading for that cliff where your technical debt and risk will catch up to you. So I always tell people careful at that philosophy, it's great that our ability to deliver is increasing as long as we have that kind of corresponding eye on the technical debt and risk that velocity of doesn't start to tank after us certain point in time, you have to, if you want to be a good, slow down to speed up sometimes.

00:23:07

Exactly. So, um, y'all have already begun to mention a little bit about business results, but what I'd like to do is, um, go to our last, the last session. Um, it's not a specific disease, but just things to, um, to be aware of referred pain and pattern recognition.

00:23:28

Yeah. I think Nicole, um, you know, talking about the, keeping those business results in front of you is important because otherwise photometrics can become another type of proxy metric, and that's not what we want, you know, in the end we're increasing flow, you know, well, why, well, because we want to increase the results, the value and what is the value of, of this product. And it could be an external product or the profit and loss, or it could be an internal product that's being used by external products, like with a shared service or capability. So, so understanding that value and, and are we doing things to improve that value? You know, the costs, keeping our eye on costs, um, cost isn't pouring in to make sure that again, uh, part of what the value is is are we can, are we managing the costs? And then the quality, because without doing that, you really don't have sustainable value. And then as we talked about the happiness, which is not just the happiness of the customer, but the happiness to the team and selves, because that is a leading indicator of things and a lagging indicator, happy teams are productive, productive teams are happy. So it's okay. What is your experience been when you're talking about flow and also talking about these business results?

00:24:44

Yeah. So it's really our north star. Um, when you start to focus too much on practices and, you know, certainly have learned this the hard way is you start following a practice and just hoping or assuming that it's going to get you the right outcomes. Uh, so maybe we'll look at story points or velocity or different things. Uh, so to actually have this discussion, think we talked a lot about discussions to talk with our stakeholders and say, what, what does value mean to you? It's such a bag term, right? What does that north star, what are we trying to accomplish here? That way we have the data now we have where we're headed and it answers the questions. A lot of times we'll get the data teams the last well we'll, do you know, what should I do? Should I do a, or should I do B or maybe C?

00:25:26

And the answer is, well, what's going to get us closer to that outcome. Um, the reason we talk about empiricism or working in a complex environment is that there isn't a one size fits all solution. So here, you know, we talk about high performing teams, empowering teams, engaging the teams team. You know, all these things we've been talking about is really giving them the data to make sure that they can head in the right direction. That's nothing, someone can give us from up high. It's nothing we can read out of a book. Um, but we can say, all right, we have the data we know where we're headed, and that really helps guide those decisions. What should we do? And is it going to move us closer to this outcome or further away? So it really helps guide the what, what do I do a discussion?

00:26:10

Is that a lot of times we assume, oh, if we do this thing, that is the sure path to success and we're convinced, and then we might do an experiment and find out, oh, actually it either didn't make a change or actually it took us away from it. And even just building that habit to say, don't assume kind of that plan do check, you know, uh, just, and making sure that we can even get better and making these decisions going back, checking, then it moved us closer to our outcome. Uh, this builds in a whole new, healthy habit. I, to, to more effectively achieve these outcomes.

00:26:48

And Carmen, do you want to talk a little bit about pattern recognition in our last minute or so?

00:26:54

Sure. So I think there's some patterns, right? Then after you get a look, you know, you see this enough, you start to see, right? So we talked a little bit about some of them already, right? So too much whip. If, if you have, you know, if your ability in a month is to do X amount of things and your work in progress is two X, three X, four acts, you know that you have a lot of things in progress. You know, you may have 3, 4, 5 months worth of work in progress. So you have to ask yourself, does that make sense? Sometimes we see things that we call the stoplight or the Christmas light pattern where it goes green, red, green, red, where a lot of features are introduced, but then you get a lot of defects and then you get a lot of features and then you get a lot of defects.

00:27:38

So it's like, what's what's going on here, right? Why can't we get ahead of this so that we're not going through this kind of cycle of, of that. And then, and then we talked a little bit about the neglected work, which were unplanned work, as Kate said, where you kind of see this work come in and it's always getting prioritized, right? You may see your flow times for defects, always under your flow time for features, and then, you know, the risks and that may have the highest flow time. So that's giving you an insight to how you're prioritizing your work because what's getting stopped while it's always the debt and the risk, you know, at the expense of the defects, which might be reasonable. But I think you need to understand that and need to understand the implications of some of these patterns when you see them

00:28:27

Fabulous. Well, that's a great, um, way to end our discussion. I appreciate you guys, um, lending your flu doctor expertise, um, to us. And, um, hopefully hopefully it's helps large organizations see that you really should begin this concept of a flow practice, um, so that you can, um, develop experts like Carmen and Kate. Thanks everyone. Thank

00:28:52

You. Thank you.