I, recently attended a Leading SAFe course. (that stands for Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) It's all about empowering complex organisations to achieve the benefits of Lean-Agile software and systems development at scale. The lastest in-vogue methodolgy taking hold across many technical industries and sectors.
I wanted today to share 1 thing with you that has really resonated with me and is something that nearly all teams, companies etc need to be focussing on right now – Flow…
SAFe is firmly grounded in four bodies of knowledge: Lean, Agile, systems thinking, and DevOps. In fact, the genesis of SAFe was to develop guidance on how to apply the principles and practices of Lean and Agile in large organisations. A Lean-Agile Mindset requires all of us to learn, embrace, and model both Lean and Agile in their behaviours in order to support adoption.
Many years ago I ran a team of Lean and Six Sigma practitioners, and we explored and exploited the entire operational approach for the Wealth Division of one of the UK’s largest banks. In my SAFe training it took me right back to those days, and the principle of flow.
What is flow?
Flow is about how items or people we are dealing with in a process move from the first step to the last. Obviously, the intention in flow is to move the item or product through the process as quick as possible, without any risk to quality and customer satisfaction. When successfully achieved, you can expect great productivity improvements (often in the region of 40% or more). Through the productivity improvement will come increased capacity to process more items, and less resource needed to do this. This is done with the aim of improving customer experience and therefore satisfaction.
In our training this week we watched this video that talked about the Theory of Constraints (TOC) which is a great explanation of why things don’t flow and how to approach overcoming that. I'd like for you to watch that too - it's 7mins long and on youtube. (but they've stopped us being able to embed in other sites, so please click the link)
TOC is a methodology for identifying the most important limiting factor (i.e. constraint) that stands in the way of achieving a goal and then systematically improving that constraint until it is no longer the limiting factor.
In simpler language the constraint is the bottleneck. It hypothesizes that every complex system, consists of multiple linked activities, one of which acts as a constraint upon the entire system.
I find one of the appealing characteristics of TOC is that it inherently prioritises improvement activities. The top priority is always the current constraint. In environments where there is an urgent need to improve, TOC offers a highly focused methodology for creating rapid improvement.
We will all be aware of the bottlenecks in our own company's or teams core processes that cause us challenges in the pursuit of delivering a great outcome and experience.
The video captures 3 approaches to overcoming bottlenecks and I think it’s fair to say that most companies approach to change is often aimed at improving flow in a type A way – trying to do the right thing, but often find ourselves moving slowly due to the chaos within a flow as a result of lots of local action taken to try and create improvements in isolation (A).
We can see examples where B has been thought about and the shake-up to create the vortex – this is often in large-scale changes, but often local actions are still disrupting the vortex and reduce the efficiencies.
What we need to not be afraid of, is to insert the straw! It may feel counter intuitive as it reduces capacity, but the increase in flow actually enables us to operate more efficiently in a really calm way, and it doesn’t actually changing the bottleneck at all.
So my ask of everyone off the back of this insight into TOC and Flow is as you encounter challenges in achieving your day-to-day tasks and outputs, is to please work out what you think the bottleneck is and communicate that to your team and leadership.
Until next time...
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