This section of the portal is for supporting the Disciplined Agile Value Stream Consultant Workshop (DAVSC), currently under development. Discussions on the pages here will take place on the Disciplined Agile LinkedIn group.

 

This page needs to be rewritten. At the moment is mostly a transcription of the slides in a section of the Disciplined Agile Value Stream Consultant workshop.

Consider what makes value streams ineffective

Symptoms of ineffective value streams:

• Handbacks
• Handoffs
• Delays in workflow
  • Waiting for people on your team (an indication of poor process)
  • Waiting for people on other teams (an indication of poorly formed teams, poor management of dependencies or workload, or poor visibility of work between teams)
• In getting feedback
• Rework
• Integration errors
• Multi-tasking
• Poor code quality

The Philosophy of Attending to the Value Stream

Discover what the right things to do are.

Doing the right thing doesn’t guarantee success, but doing the wrong thing will guarantee failure

When effective factors are not attended to we can improve them. Doing so will either improve our results or teach us about something that will.

We almost always want to start with MBIs because it makes things more efficient directly and indirectly  and make it easier for teams to learn

Factors for Effective Value Streams

Items being worked on are of high value – There’s nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all. Peter Drucker

Principle	Actions to take	Waste created if don’t have
Eliminate waste by not working on items of lesser importance	Use Minimum Business Increments (MBIs)	Items larger than necessary Takes longer to finish Delayed feedback Too much work in process Difficult to prioritize Difficult to align

Items being worked on are small – Often reducing batch size is all it takes to bring a system back into control. Dr. Eli Goldratt

Principle	Actions to take	Waste created if don’t have
Smaller gets completed faster Reduces WIP Faster feedback reduces waste	Use Minimum Business Increments (MBIs)	Items larger than necessary Takes longer to finish Delayed feedback Too much work in process Difficult to get stakeholders to delay getting their work started even when it benefits the whole to do so

Have an efficient workflow

Principle	Actions to take	Waste created if don’t have
Delays cause waste Handoffs and handbacks cause waste Manage queues	Limit work movement by organizing and allocating people to improve collaboration	Lose knowledge Creates interruptions Creates unplanned work Causes multi-tasking

All work and workflow is visible

Principle	Actions to take	Waste created if don’t have
You cannot manage what is not visible Collaboration is impeded when work is not visible	Make all work, workflow and methods visible	People get surprised, causes interruptions and multi-tasking Too much work in process Poor collaboration Slower learning

Work level does not exceed capacity at any bottleneck

Principle	Actions to take	Waste created if don’t have
When workload makes people be overloaded, delays, waste and low quality are created	Have an intake process Manage queues	Working on too many things Multi-tasking Delays create extra work Delayed feedback Delayed value delivery

Good product quality and architecture

Principle	Actions to take	Waste created if don’t have
Poor quality creates extra work	Test-first Automated testing	Extra work Can’t coordinate as well

In addition, how do we achieve these?

Management’s role is to facilitate creating  great value streams. Must work with the teams to do so, not dictate to them, but support them.

Systems thinking is required. Systems thinking is more about the relationships between the components than the components themselves. This reflects – Act locally, but in the global context – DA’s principle “Enterprise Awareness”

The organization the value stream is in must provide a positive influence to these factors. For example, do HR policies encourage positive actions or deter it?

Additional Resources

See the main Value Streams page for more.

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This chapter was an excerpt from FLEX for the Disciplined Agilist: FLow for Enterprise Transformation (online book). It has been edited to fit into the Disciplined Agile Value Stream Consultant workshop. The Table of Contents for the book is here.