What are Flow Metrics in Software Delivery Value Streams?

hi it's Naomi from task top in this tutorial we're going to explore flow metrics and answer the following questions what are the flow metrics in software delivery wire flow metrics important and how our flow metrics measured software delivery organizations exist to provide value to the business in some cases the products you develop and maintain are used by external customers and sometimes they're used purely by internal customers either way there are a lot of activities that must take place to deliver that value and they are carried out by different specialists working in a variety of purpose fit tools to maximize their productivity that is called a product value stream flow metrics measure how much value is being delivered by each product value stream and measure the speed at which it's delivered start to finish because these metrics frame software delivery in terms of value and flow they provide a common language for IT and the business by abstracting away that technical terminology and because they measure the system as a whole they can uniquely identify how and where to invest your optimization efforts and how to focus on what really is your bottleneck so what do the flow metrics measure they measure the output of value stream produces now you could say the people are working on requirements tasks use cases stories incidents and vulnerabilities but that is often too in the weeds for these type of discussions at the end of the day any work a software delivery organization undertakes needs to be expressed in terms of the value your customers get from it and in any IT organization all the work can be rolled up into one of these for flow item types first you have your features those are new behaviors use cases or functionality that drive a business result and they are visible to your customers next you have your defects those are fixes for quality problems that affect the customer experience the third category is debt those are the improvements to the software architecture or operational infrastructure and lastly you have risk which encapsulate all the work you do to address security privacy and compliance exposures so now let's discuss wire flow metrics important no doubt you are already gathering a lot of metrics in your organization and your reporting several of them up to the CIO and your business counterparts those metrics typically measure improvements in process productivity quality cost revenue or adherence to standards flow metrics do not replace those metrics rather they provide a different unique set of metrics per product value stream flow metrics measured the rate of value delivered for each products value stream correlated to a desired business outcomes they support data-driven decision making about how to achieve the right rate of value delivery to achieve the business outcomes that you want let's illustrate this over a traffic analogy if your objective is to get the most flow items from the starting point to the finish line there are five data points that can guide you based on your previous performance can you accurately forecast how long it will take to get to the finish line can you become more predictable in your time to market forecasts that's flow time a measurement of how long things take to get from start to finish next based on your priorities how many flow items of each type do you want to deliver and how will you allocate resources accordingly how would you set the strategic direction for this value stream well--that's flow distribution now think of a highway with a given capacity based on your software delivery capacity where should you set the limit on the number of concurrent flow items in progress at which point our team's slowing down due to too much work in progress that's slow load now think of a traffic gem based on the proportion of time your flow items are waiting where are your bottlenecks that's flow efficiency at the end of a reporting period when you've reached that finish line how many flow items have you actually completed that's your productivity measure called flow velocity when you calculate flow metrics on an ongoing basis your decisions are informed not only by your intentions but by your actual performance in previous periods let's drill into how each flow metric is measured now we'll examine them one by one first up its flow time flow time measures how long it takes teams to complete work from the moment it's been accepted to the moment it is released here's an example consider a customer request comes in that's when lead time calculation would begin but certainly some time elapses until the request is accepted acceptance is a subjective milestone which can be different for each value stream but that's when flow time begins because this is when the flow item in our example of feature actually begins going through a prescriptive set of activities to completion so let's say the request is accepted on day four at that moment the flow time clock begins and it continues to run until the item is delivered it counts all the days the flow item is actively worked on and all those days it's sitting waiting in a queue somewhere the flow time clock stops when the request is delivered which incidentally is the same day the lead time clock stops as well each value stream can determine what the condition is for something to be done and delivered in this example flow time stopped on day 37 making flow time 33 days and lead time 37 days in summary flow time measures the total time it takes for flow items to go from work start to work complete including both active wait times measuring your flow time helps you understand your actual time to market identifying when you're improving and when you're slowing down and overall it helps become more predictable in your time to market forecasts the next metric we'll learn about is flow efficiency flow efficiency is the metric that reveals inefficiencies and bottlenecks and your value streams it tells you whether teams are waiting on work for significant periods of time let's go back to our previous example our our flow time metric is 33 days that means it takes 33 days to deliver value through the value stream including both active and wait States now is there an opportunity to improve flow efficiency calculates the proportion of active time to wait time within the total flow time it is the percentage of active time out of the total flow time in our example it's 21% the flow item is actively being worked on for 21% of flow time many organizations have a flow efficiency between five and fifteen percent which leaves a lot to be desired a flow efficiency of 40 percent is considered very good when you have much lower flow efficiency metrics it means you have excessive wait times and a lot of opportunity for optimization you could be delivering more value if you resolve your bottlenecks in summary flow efficiency is the proportion of active time versus wait time out of the total elapsed time flow efficiency can identify when waste is increasing or decreasing in your processes next up is a flow velocity flow velocity is a productivity metric that measures how many flow items of each type your customers are getting within a reporting period let's take a look at an example let's say your reporting period is three weeks on day one zero flow items have been completed by the end of week one your team's have completed one feature two defects zero risks and one debt the end of week 2 your teams have completed two features for defects two risks and three debts and at the end of the reporting period after three weeks you've completed four features seven defects five risks and five debts that is your actual flow velocity is it what you expected would you have liked to do more flow velocity helps you see your bottom line contribution to the business during a reporting time period and use it to fine-tune what you're going to do going forward in summary flow velocity is the number of flow items of each type completed over a particular period of time it's a productivity metric and it's used to gauge whether value delivery is accelerating or decelerating next up and closely related is flow distribution consider what you delivered in the last reporting period is the split between the types of flow items in line with your strategic intention is it in line with where you are in this product's life cycle flow distribution measures whether you are putting the right capacity towards features versus risks versus defects versus debt flow distribution takes your flow velocity and represents the distribution of flow item types out of 100 percent you can set a desired flow distribution to make priorities clear and trade-offs evident at the beginning of a reporting period when you decide what work goes into the pipe and you can measure your actual distribution at the end of the reporting period in summary flow distribution is the ratio of the for flow items completed over a particular time period and it's used as input to prioritize specific types of work during specific time frames in order to meet a desired business outcome and finally let's learn about flow load flow load is a leading indicator if teams are overloaded and have too much work in progress relative to their capacity flow time and flow velocity will both suffer so flow load helps you find the right balance between demand and capacity let's look at an example let's say on day 1 of a reporting period you have zero flow items in progress at the end of week 1 you have 14 flow items in progress and in week 2 the load goes up you now have 20 flow items in progress based on your team's capacity that might be too much if you reach that you can anticipate flow time will be longer and flow velocity will go down in summary flow load is the number of flow items in progress within a particular value stream flow load monitors over and the under utilization of value streams which can lead to reduce productivity tasks top helps software delivery organizations gather and measure their flow metrics contact us today for an evaluation or personalized demo at tasks top comm

Channel: Tasktop

Views: 5,012

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Flow Metrics, Flow Framework, Flow Time, Flow Load, Flow Distribution, Flow Velocity, Flow Efficiency, Dr. Mik Kersten, Tasktop, Flow Metric, Flow Predictability

Id: uBEZoXc4A5w

Length: 12min 2sec (722 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 11 2018