Re-read Saturday, Tame you Work Flow Week 21: Final Thoughts

Tame your Work Flow

We began our re-read of Tame your Work Flow by Steve Tendon and Daniel Doiron, on Saturday, May 23rd. The world has changed a lot as we worked our way through the book. However, there are important ideas in this book that are far less transitory than the changes we’ve seen in 2020 will be. One of those ideas is finding the constraint in complex, messy workflows. They even add an acronym for this scenario to our alphabet soup vocabulary – PEST. In the messy real-world Steve and Daniel describe how to identify the constraint and then track it as it moves around. This is the difference between understanding flow in theory and doing something about it in practice. I used this approach twice just this week.  Another great and useful idea is the concept of full-kitting. I gauge the value of this kind of book by whether I can use the material and whether it makes me think. I have been able to use these concepts and more in my consulting practice since my first read of the book. The second time through, this re-read, has only deepened my understanding and appreciation of the ideas in TameFlow.

 

Re-read Saturday, Tame you Work Flow Week 19: Chapter 20—Operational Governance in PEST Environments

Tame your Work Flow

A few logistical comments before we dive into chapter 20.  After this week we have three weeks left in this re-read including our customary debrief. When we decided on Tame your Work Flow we decided on the next two books in the series due to the intense competition, so in four weeks, we will begin Jeff Dalton’s Great Big Agile.  We will only read the part of the book that addresses the Agile Performance Holarchy. This is not a slight to the rest of the book which includes a wide range of tools and techniques that are consumable (I keep a copy close at hand) and do not need further analysis. 

 

Re-read Saturday, Tame you Work Flow Week 18: Chapter 18—Full-Kitting as Ongoing Executive Activity

Tame your Work Flow

Cue the eerie sound effects from low budget science fiction movies that signal time travel. After publishing our re-read of Chapter 19 last week, Steve Tendon sent me a message, “where is chapter 18?” I nearly responded right after chapter 17 but a little voice told me to check. Low and behold, I had not addressed Full-Kitting as Ongoing Executive Activity, otherwise known as chapter 18. Today, we go back in time and review the first chapter in Part 6 of Tame your Work Flow by Daniel Doiron and Steve Tendon. 

 

Re-read Saturday, Tame you Work Flow Week 17: Chapter 19—Execution Management in PEST Environments

Tame your Work Flow

This week we tackle Chapter 19 of Steve Tendon and Daniel Doiron’s  Tame your Work Flow.  Chapter 19 combines many of the moving parts from the previous chapters into a set of tools for monitoring the execution of work.  The authors pick up at the portfolio level developed in Chapter 18. Portfolio items, once committed and placed into flow, can contain many groups of work that Steve and Daniel term Minimal Outcome-Value Effort or MOVEs (see week 14). Once in flow (being worked on), a flow manager picks up managing the MOVEs. 

 

Re-read Saturday, Tame you Work Flow Week 15: Chapter 16 – Introduction to Execution Management Signals

Tame your Work Flow

This chapter spends time describing and using Critical-Chain Project Management (CCPM) as a tool generating signals that help organizations control the flow of work in real-time and with a forward bias. I was introduced to CCPM early in my career (along with a number of other scheduling and planning tools). While I have not used these techniques as wholes recently  I have found the ideas they are based on and pieces and parts useful every day. This is a long way of saying, don’t skip to the next chapter. Steve and Daniel state very early in the chapter that “in the Tameflow Approach we are not thinking about the execution of the plan, but more specifically about the execution of the work.” Focusing on the execution of the work requires an appropriate mechanism that can signal trouble coming that is information-based rather than gut-based. 

 

Re-read Saturday, Tame you Work Flow Week 14: Chapter 15—Outcomes, Values, and Efforts in PEST Environments

Tame your Work Flow

Chapter 15 of Tame your Work Flow, introduces the concept of a MOVE, which stands for Minimal Outcome-Value Effort. Steve and Daniel use the construct to help define an atomic level of value delivery that is both minimalistic and sufficient. MOVE, while not replacing the myriad Mxx acronyms (e.g. minimal viable product or minimal marketable product), provides a mental model for defining items in your portfolio backlog that is focused on throughput accounting.

 

Re-read Saturday, Tame you Work Flow Week 13: Chapter 14 – Flow Efficiency, DBR, and TameFlow Kanban Boards

Tame your Work Flow

I find Chapter 14 useful in a book of useful chapters. In this chapter, Steve and Daniel explain the foreshadowed idea of full-kitting and introduce two different versions of kanban boards.

I am a big fan of the idea of the definition of ready. I have written several columns on the topic (for example, Ready to Develop from 2015, in which you will note that my definition is much closer to Steve and Daniel’s concept of full-kitting than some of the austere definitions of ready). It has never made sense to me to start working on a story if you didn’t think you could complete the work. It’s like making a platter of hamburgers for a party if you haven’t bought or even planned to buy the meat. The definition of full-kitting is “everything that is needed for the whole journey to done is known, available, or can be made available just-in-time when required.” This helps to ensure that there is no logistical reason not to complete a work item. I have found this concept to be useful and now is a “must consider“ when pulling any piece of work from my backlog. Full-kitting puts a lot of pressure on getting work prepared before it enters the workflow. This might feel esoteric or like it is a tweak on the idea of the definition of ready, but I have seen examples of teams (including whole Agile Release Trains) working for months on features only to have them warehoused because the overall application was not ready for them. Having your work warehoused is frustrating, not to mention expensive to do work that can’t go forward.

 

Re-read Saturday, Tame you Work Flow Week 12: Chapter 13—Portfolio Prioritization and Selection in PEST Environments

Tame your Work Flow

Those that control work entry, control the health of a team, and at a product level, the health of the organization. Messrs. Tendon and Doiron discuss portfolio and work entry in Chapter 13 of  Tame your Work Flow. Putting my biases on the table I believe that Reinertsen (Product Development Flow) and Leffingwell et al. (Scaled Agile Framework Enterprise) have advanced the discussion of portfolio prioritization immensely with the concept of the Cost of Delay. That said, Steve and Daniel, advance the ball even further. The sad part of the conversation is that most organizations that I have insight into leverage brute force politics to prioritize portfolios and are subject to suboptimization within silos.

 

Re-read Saturday, Tame you Work Flow Week 4: Chapter 3 – Flow Efficiency, Little’s Law and Economic Impact

Tame your Work Flow

Self-knowledge is valuable to keep yourself reigned in, I really think Little’s Law is important. This week I needed to make sure I did not go overboard in discussing the ramifications of the theorem (I will include links at the end of this week’s re-read for those who want to go into depth). Chapter 3 of Tame your Work Flow is incredibly important for understanding the overall book. In your re-read spend the time needed understanding how the themes noted in the chapter title Flow Efficiency, Little’s Law and Economic Impact inter-relate.

 

Re-read Saturday, Tame you Work Flow Week 3: Chapter 2—Postpone Commitment and Limit Work in Process

Tame your Work Flow

Re-read Saturday, Tame you Work Flow Week 3:  Chapter 2—Postpone Commitment and Limit Work in Process

Today we tackle Chapter 2 in our re-read of Tame your Work Flow by Steve Tendon and Daniel Doiron. The chapter is titled Postpone Commitment and Limit Work in Process. Last we mentioned multitasking, this week we make a full assault on the topic.