The First Way: The Principles of Flow: Part-1
Hello everyone. Welcome Back to the series after a very long time. The delay wasn’t intentional but it so happened. Hoping to be consistent henceforth.
In the previous article of the series, we discussed in brief all the three ways. Now in this one, we will see the first way in a bit more detail.
In the technology value stream, the work flows from Development to Operations or from Dev to Ops in short. The faster the flow is, the faster the delivery of value to the customers.
How we do the above is through making work visible, reducing batch sizes, by building quality in, preventing defects from being passed to downstream work centers
The by products of the doing are
reducing the lead time to fulfill internal and external customer requests
increasing the quality of work
making the organization more more responsive to the customer and market needs
Make our Work Visible
A major difference between technology and manufacturing value streams is that our work is invisible as the transfer of work between work centers can be done with a click of button
Due to the ease in doing the task, work can bounce between teams due to incomplete information or the problems remain completely invisible resulting in delay in the delivery of the promised improvements or features.
To avoid the issues mentioned above, we should make the work visible using work boards like Kanban boards. It helps in making the work visible and also in managing the work in order to make it flow from left to right as quickly as possible. Also it helps to zero in on the unnecessary hand-offs which introduce unnecessary delays. Work is considered to be done when those features are available in production
Limit Work in Process
In Manufacturing, daily work is dictated by a production schedule which is in turn governed by other factors like order due dates, parts availability etc. But in technology, the work is more dynamic
Disruptions in the manufacturing space is highly visible and costly but same in the technology is invisible.
In order to avoid that we can impose WIP limits for each column as shown earlier. It helps to see problems that prevent completion of work. The focus shifts to completing the already started work.
We will see the other principles of flow in future posts.
