To remain relevant amid increasing market disruption, organizations have no choice but to compress their software delivery timelines to deliver features customers want, faster.
Frequently, tactical decisions are made to add people, invest in more tools, and increase the amount of work in teams’ backlogs without achieving the desired results. Agile transformations introduce methodologies and frameworks without the appropriate support mechanisms for success. To enable high performance and inform strategic decisions, organizations need a new foundation.
During this on-demand webinar, Tasktop Flow Framework Engagement Manager, Kristen Biddulph, presents how Flow Metrics provide that foundation, irrespective of methodology or framework, by surfacing end-to-end data on an organization’s flow of work, providing insights that will help them meet their goals.
An executive from Bank of America explained in an interview that, “Technology has completely changed the notion of business integration. You cannot say the business is technology or technology enables the business—they are one and the same.” However, frequently there is a disconnect between business and IT, both sides speaking their own language. Compound that by orienting around a product and the disparate views become more apparent: 1 product vs 7 artifact types, 6 tools, 10 projects, across 8 teams. Furthermore, without a ‘north star’ and clear value chain, product managers struggle to know when to turn away work which clouds the backlog dragging the end-to-end flow of work with it.
We know the work that we do resides in tools – ALM QC, Snow, Jira – there are so many diff ways that artifacts are grouped within tools and multiple teams working with them. Visualizing and measuring the end-to-end workflow is a foundational requirement for enabling companies to master software-based solutions at scale. That’s what the Flow Framework addresses.
Tasktop is uniquely positioned to strategically execute on a practical, realistic, concrete approach.
We’ve been able to observe VS flows & patterns from over 300 enterprises across diff industries (finance, retail, Ins, auto, health, technology, academia, fed govt, etc…)
Our approach is driven by this experience & our thought leadership – with the amazing talent on our team and access to recognized authors & speakers, culminating in Mik’s book on the FF. …
FF is our “north star” for our product roadmap & company strategy.
TRANS: We use the FF to measure & optimize the flow of biz value through product-oriented software value streams that are correlated to business results.
EX: FF highlights the end-to-end workflow (Ideate/Create/Release/Operate) so you can see where bottlenecks are – see what’s slowing things down at the PVS level and fix the problem.
We (Tasktop) have 2 main PVS’s (Viz & Hub). Between the two, they bring all aspects of the Flow Framework™ to life.
Starting at the bottom, 1st tools that teams use to manage work get connected to Tasktop,
then you identify which artifacts (stories/epics/features/vulnerabilities) in those diff tools impact the flow of biz value, and from there, model the PVS (model the workflow),
then you can easily start capturing data to view flow metrics in Viz.
Viz is what provides the visibility and insights throughout your journey of moving toward a product-centric way of working.
Message: Our goal is to optimize flow for business results. Making this visible and providing measurement will prompt prioritization conversations between IT and business that will ultimately assist with breaking down the historic silo and enable them to come together as one team. Furthermore, defining work as features, defects, debt and risk will promote the right behavior to achieve your companies desired goals. There will be intentional tradeoffs of prioritization across these categories to be successful. One infamous example is of Bill Gates 2002 memo on trustworthy computing where he wisely stated “Trustworthiness is a much broader concept than security, and winning our customers' trust involves more than just fixing bugs and achieving "five-nines" availability. It's a fundamental challenge that spans the entire computing ecosystem, from individual chips all the way to global Internet services. It's about smart software, services and industry-wide cooperation.” Analyzing these actions through the Flow Framework, he set the north star of first focusing on risk, then focusing on debt, and understood the tradeoff of this focus meant turning new feature work down to zero.
We view the flow item types as units of value creation.
Features drive…
Defects lead to …
Risks provide the necessary updates for …
Debts improve…
Now let’s view the how we measure these flow items in the flow framework.
A Flow Efficiency gain of just 1-2 points translates into a 10-20% reduction in time to market and that is significant when organizations must find ways to compress the timeline to deliver the features customers seek amid increasing market disruption to stay relevant.
We start small…
The main concept that enables gains is data-driven continuous improvement.
Executive Champion -
Value Stream Product Manager -
Value Stream Architect - (have end-to-end tool focus)
Value Stream Implementer -