What is flow efficiency | Make Scrum work | Reduce Cycle Time
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- Опубліковано 21 жов 2024
- Using cycle, percentiles and Monte Carlo simulation so that you never have estimate work again or go through all the evil activities surrounding estimation that just waste yours and everyone else’s time is great. But what happens when you calculate all of this but the resulting data and forecast you see simply isn’t good enough?
Well firstly congratulations you now at least know there is a problem but where do you start?
The answer to that is flow efficiency. So what is flow efficiency? Well before I get into that, if you agree that estimation is evil - it is - and that tracking cycle time to make forecasts for single items is the way forward - it definitely is - then controlling the factors that effect cycle time should be a high priority for you.
These factors can at a basic level be broken into 2 parts, active time and inactive time. Active time is the time you spend actually working on a story, inactive time is everything else. So we want to minimise inactive time and maximise active time.
Flow efficiency is a simple calculation of these 2 variables. Flow efficiency equals active time divided by cycle time.
Using flow efficiency you’ll be able to find out where to start improving your process to reduce tire cycle times and get better and more accurate forecasts.
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Hi Steve, as a new scrum master. I found your channels very helpful. Just catching up with this video now and i hope its not too late to ask for a video on good working agreements and how it should look like.
Hi and thanks that means a lot to me 🙏👍 I haven’t done one on team working agreements but I’ll put it on my backlog.
Steve I love your videos, you are excellent at delivering the important messaging from them. My one criticism in this one however is the use of a Blocked status. By having a dedicated Blocked status you lose all context as to which status the work item was in when it was blocked. Plus, where would you put that status on the Ageing WIP chart? Time waiting is not really a "blocker", it is just idle time so it would be far more meaningful to add some 'wait states' to the workflow e.g. Development done or Ready for test, which you can then use time in those statuses as your waiting time. Just add them up. It also gives you greater clarity as to where in the system you have the largest periods of idle time which will aide prioritisation of which part of the system needs improving next.
With Jira specifically, when an item is actually blocked it is better practice to Flag the item. Again, this preserves important context as to which status the item was in when it became blocked. As mentioned Steve, this is my one criticism of some of your videos on Flow Metrics. Everything else you preach I am fully supportive and always do enjoy watching your content!
Thanks Fabio I really appreciate that thank you 🙏👍 Yes I agree adding dedicated wait states would be better, I used the blocked on hold column as an example for speed and ease but you’re right 👍
@@TheAgileLeanGardener thanks for the clarification Steve. Having seen many of your videos, my assumption was that you would support having dedicated wait states in the workflow. It may be helpful if this trail of thought were mentioned in future videos to help clarify the position or just simply to provide more than one option. Either way, thanks for being so open to the feedback and for the response 👍
Yep absolutely, I’m going to do an update to this video so watch this space 🙏👍
Hi Steve! Did you do the work agreement video after all?
Hi, no I haven’t done that yet, I didn’t get many comments asking for it. Is it something you’re interested in?
Hi Steve, another great video. Thank you, I really enjoy your channel. Can you provide a little more clarity around inactive time and when to move tickets to blocked/on hold whenever you are not working on them. Do you treat it like a chess clock i.e., lunch, finished work for the day, waiting on a response before I can proceed etc. In other words, "whenever" I am not working on it it's moved to the blocked/on hold state or is that a little bit too granular?
Hi Matt and thanks I really appreciate that, thank you. Right ok great question. Yes you have it more or less spot on. The important part of inactive time is to find out how long you’re ‘not’ working on a ticket compared to how long you ‘are’ working on it. If there is a lot of inactive time it’s highlighting a problem - it doesn’t tell you what the problem is and you’ll have to analyse why and then try to fix it (while keeping its active time the same or better). So yes move the ticket to blocked/onhold whenever you’re not working on it but don’t bother about lunch, end of day or weekends there is no need to go to that level, it’s not needed. Most tools allow you to set working days so you can exclude weekends if you don’t work weekends and some even allow you to say how many working hours per day but again you don’t need to worry about that as it’s going too low a level. I know this can be difficult to sell to them team so you have to explain why it’s important and the benefits to them. Hope that helps.
@@TheAgileLeanGardener Hi Steve, perfect. Thank you. Difficult to sell, yes, but estimation is Evil and tracking cycle time is the way forward 🙂
Hehe yes exactly! Best of luck with it, let me know how you get on 👍
I have try it¡ it really works¡¡ thanks for the info
You’re welcome! You’re now on your way to better flow efficiency:-)
Can move in progress story back on hold
Yes, that can often happen, a work item/story goes from blocked/on hold to in progress then back to blocked/on hold then back to in progress - but the tool you're using will track all the time spent in each status even if it moves back and forth between 2 of them.
How can I use these in any other concept that is not agile? I.e payments life cycles?
Hi, great question, you can use flow metrics for anything, you just need to track your work (so for example have steps that you follow, so ‘to do’ for things you’re going to do but haven’t started yet, ‘in progress’ for things you’re currently working on ‘done’ for completed items and ‘blocked’ for things you’ve started but can’t continue for some reason) there are plenty of tools out there that will do this for you such as Jira or Azure DevOps but you could even do it in Excel or a physical whiteboard but you would need to manually put the date and time it entered and exited each step to allow you to calculate things like flow efficiency and cycle time.
What is the difference between Cycle Tme and Active Time
Hi, Cycle Time is the time it takes from any 2 points in your workflow (for example To Do and Done which includes any time it spends in blocked/on hold). Active time can be thought of as the same ‘minus’ the time it sits in blocked/on hold. Hope that helps.
@@TheAgileLeanGardener Thank you
Hi Steve, hope you're well?
OK, I'm running into an interesting debate ref. the old Shakespearean question... to Blocked/On Hold or not to Blocked/On Hold.
Specifically as to whether this should be a separate column on the board or work items should be flagged instead of moved to a Blocked/On Hold status.
Honestly, they have some compelling arguments (please see link below) but I'm not sure if flagging still enables us to track active/inactive time?
ua-cam.com/video/PP95keF6mis/v-deo.html
I'd be really interested in your thoughts.
Many thanks
Matt
Hey 😊 haha to blocked/on hold or to not blocked/on hold, I like it 😉 well the purpose of that column is to help us identify active vs inactive work items. I don’t think you can get that data by simply tagging, it needs to be in a workflow state, what that state is called really doesn’t matter. You could simply place a wip limit on that column but you don’t want to go crazy with wip limits, build them up slowly. In any case (in their example in the video) if you got to a point where their 10 work items had all managed to get into the blocked state this is clearly indicating a fairly major problem which would need immediate investigation. One of the issues with a blocked column is that people are too happy to stick an item in there and leave them there when what they should be doing is doing everything possible to get it out. You could put a wip limit of 1 on the blocked state to hammer the point home. Hope that helps a little.
@@TheAgileLeanGardener Hi Steve, yep, completely agree. I just don't see how you get active/inactive time by just flagging. It feels like it has to be a workflow state.
Also completely agree that the workflow in the example I shared has major problems if all work items are moving to blocked and just sitting there and people are not doing everything they can to get them unblocked.
So, in conclusion, I am going to continue to advocate that we include a Blocked/On Hold column into our workflow and coach good board management.
I just need to convince the flaggers (and there are a lot of them :-))
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more :-)
Thank you
Matt
PS - If you ever fancy doing a video on your top 10 books, that would be great 🙂
Yeah the real trick is getting buy-in from the team(s) to actually update the board, at the right time. It’s always been a challenge to get team(s) to do this. But the main thing is to show them that by doing this it will benefit them - less pressure (leading to better wellbeing) and fixed time/fixed scope work from leadership (as they will have provided realistic forecasts), actually discovering what is holding them back and doing something about it, better ceremonies leading to the right conversations (not just doing them for the sake of it), better engagement and transparency with stakeholders and less time spent messing about with story points/velocity so more time to actually get things done - they only have to update the board at the right time (takes just a few seconds) to get all this good stuff going - I know it’s easier said than done but it pays off big time for everyone, literally everyone in the end. Best of luck with it and thanks for the suggestion on the video, will have a think 👍
@@TheAgileLeanGardener Yep, it's really starting to sink in now but the flaggers knocked me off track 🙂
Thanks for clarifying, really helped.
Matt
🙏 💪 👍
Fantástico
Gracias :-)