Visualising your flow of work

 Visualising your flow of work

I think often a lot of pressure is put on the quantity of work that a team should do (usually in a particular timeframe) but less on how quickly the individual pieces of work flow through the pipeline. The interesting thing is, the quicker the work flows through the pipeline, the earlier the customer gets visibility (providing value to the customer and also a great way of getting early feedback). 

Why is it useful to visualise your flow?

Visualising your flow can help identify and eliminate bottlenecks earlier. Any item that gets stuck mid flow (blocked) is waste. Moving items through the pipeline efficiency ensures maximum value to the customer and ensures early feedback on new features.

Put it this way, there is no point having a tester waiting for work, a PR sitting in review and 2 devs completing new (related or unrelated) items. 

Similarly there is no point in a developer picking up a new piece of work if the team already has a large amount of active items which are in progress (or blocked). Rather than picking up new items, a member of the team should consider pairing with another team member or helping unblock a blocker on a story.

WIP limits can be useful to help ensure that work flows through the system as it will force the team to eliminate bottlenecks by deterring them from picking up another item for example. The team has to essentially pull together the remove blockers and remove bottlenecks when there is too much work on the board.

Walking the board during stand ups can be a great way to visualising (and monitoring) your pipeline and identifying any issue with the flow of work before they become a big problem.