Over the past year, Dr. Kersten and his Flow Advisory team have been collecting value stream data sets from enterprise IT organizations undergoing digital transformation treatments. They used the Flow Metrics defined in Project to Product to trace the path that hundreds of thousands of software artifacts travel from inception to running software. As they analyzed and correlated Flow Metrics to business results, some fascinating clinical tales emerged from these unique new data sets. The team discussed the findings with the patients to gain a more personal perspective on the outcome of the treatment plans.

In this talk, Dr. Kersten will take us through the most common, the most problematic, and the most bizarre flow diagnoses that he has encountered. By holistically considering the data as well as the human and organizational aspects of the diagnosis, he will follow the approach of the neurological case histories recounted by Oliver Sacks in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. For each flow diagnosis, Dr. Kersten will recount misdiagnoses that were previously applied, followed by a detailed case history, summary of the remedies, and the often-surprising results. From common maladies to rare pathologies, each of the stories offers powerful lessons to help us understand the biggest impediments to achieving DevOps at scale.