Delays in the Workflow May be the Most Significant Choke Point to Your Flow of Value Delivery
Joshua Barnes
I help organizations, leadership, and teams improve value delivery with agile, lean, hybrid, and value stream management.
All Things Value Delivery Management: Value Flow Factor - Delays
Delays in the workflow may be the most significant choke point to your flow of value delivery. One of the misperceptions that I have encountered numerous times supporting organizations going through an agile adoption and digital transformation is the desire to have teams work faster. Faster in this context is to reduce the time it takes to complete work (tasks). Unfortunately, the mindset is usually that people are not working efficiently enough or sometimes hard enough, resulting in it taking too long to get anything delivered.
An agile way of working is perceived to be more efficient: therefore, as teams adopt agile, they can get more work done in a shorter period. In most situations, people are already working hard and efficiently completing tasks. Room for improvement over a waterfall or hybrid way of working, almost always, but in most cases, it will not be a 400% or 4000% increase.
The bigger culprit is the waiting time (delays) between the value-adding tasks. This factor is almost always an area for improvement, yet no one is attending to it. Enter the Value Delivery Manager, who observes workflow to understand where delays are, which work is in progress, and the cause for delays.
How to Identify Delays
Our training workshops and coaching cover many practices and techniques to support identifying and reducing or eliminating delays. These are a few examples of my go-to practices that a Value Delivery Manager uses:
Visualizing work and when it is delayed is very effective in raising awareness of what is happening and collaborating on why and how to reduce or eliminate the delay.
Suppose something is getting in the way of delivering value, such as delays. In that case, the Value Delivery Manager observes, identifies, and collaborates on improving the environment and removing what is hurting our flow.
In this article, I will step you through two options, "Kanban Board Flow Tracking" and "Story Tracing ." These are two examples from our value delivery manager training.
Practice: Kanban Board Movement Tracking
One of the high rewards with little effort practices is what I call Kanban Board Movement Tracking. The Value Delivery Manager regularly takes screenshots of a team's Kanban board and pastes them on a virtual canvas tool such as Miro or Mural. This activity takes, at most, a few minutes. However, doing it daily requires just a bit of discipline and minimal effort.
Using a virtual canvas, my default is Miro, enables observation of many bits of information; one is how work is or is not moving. Figures 1-3 are examples of daily screenshots of Kanban boards—a few seconds to take the screenshot and paste it into a Miro board.
Looking at snapshots across time enables spotting trends or outliers, having someone doing this, and taking a few minutes to observe what is flowing and what is not. What is moving forward and what is going backward is VERY valuable. Yet, who on your team or in your organization is doing this? Far too often, no one. Sure, the team coach or Product Owner can and should be doing this or any alternative technique that yields similar information, but most, if not all, don't.?
This practice, on initial discussion, has been met with push-back because it appears very time-consuming. It is not. Once you set up this approach, it takes very little time. In addition, the cost of not doing this or an alternative is very costly. If we have a systemic delay in our workflow, which we don't identify nor focus on removing, that is often a high cost.
The Value Delivery Manager role has the time (capacity) and skills to do this, and the benefits can be potent. Let's look at what they do when they spot frequently delayed work.
Practice: Story Tracing
The following practice from our training that Value Delivery Managers can use to raise awareness of a delay and work on removing it is what I call "story tracing." It is a way to trace a story through its lifecycle once pulled into the workflow. In addition, this practice provides benefits at higher levels of work, such as "Feature Tracing" and "MBI Tracing."
Using the previous practice, we spot stories that take much longer to reach done than estimated. Through the snapshots in time gleaned from the workflow on the Team's Kanban board, the Value Delivery Manager visually depicts the trace of its flow from when it is pulled into the workflow through reaching the Definition of Done. I can best show this technique by using an example based on a team I worked with and a person I trained as a Value Delivery Manager. Meet team Super-Terrific.
Team Super-Terrific
The following example is based on a team that used a timeboxed approach (sprints) that were two weeks in duration. They struggled with getting work completed, and it was a growing concern. Although most everyone knew carry-over work was increasing, no one had the time or focus to do something about it. There was pressure to get work done, resulting in each team member's head-down focus on completing as many tasks as possible. Sound familiar?
When setting up Kanban boards, I strongly recommend columns for value-adding activities (on this example with blue underlines) and waiting queues (red underlined). Queues provide immediate insight into the number of items waiting for the next value-adding activity(ies). More importantly, you can track how long the work has been waiting.?
Note: this example includes a column that is not typical, "needs clarification." That column captures how often stories were handed back to the Product Owner. The team had a definition of ready, providing context on what was needed in both acceptance criteria and discussion. Unfortunately, it was not being honored, and the team members were suffering. In addition, the Product Owner was frequently unavailable for timely collaboration, increasing the problem. I often use this example because it resonates so well with teams who find themselves in this scenario.
In this example, I have marked an outlier story with a red triangle. Let's see this story go through the workflow.
At the start of the first iteration (sprint), figure 4 shows the stories the team pulled into this iteration after completing their Iteration Planning event. The team has pulled ten stories onto the Kanban board from the Product Backlog and placed them in the To-Do column. These stories are the work they plan to do in this iteration, and they "should" have all ten of these stories meet the product's Definition of Done (DoD).
The subsequent figures will show screenshots of the first few days of this iteration and all days in the first and second iterations. In figure 4, I placed a red triangle with an exclamation point atop a story we will trace. Imagine that the Value Delivery Manager has taken daily screenshots of team Super-Terrific's iteration Kanban Board, pasted them on a Miro board, and monitored the flow of work.
Uh-oh, they observed a story that sat in waiting columns and went forward and backward multiple times. Figures five through eight show this; let's follow the red triangle.
Figure 5 is a screenshot of day 1, after iteration planning and after they have pulled 3 of the ten stories into their workflow. The story we are following and will trace is one of the first to enter this iteration's work. At this juncture, everything is looking normal. Work pulled in appears reasonable.
The story is still in development on day two; however, by day three, it goes backward in flow on the Kanban board. The team members working on the tasks of this story (unit tests, writing code, and QA test assets -test cases, test scripts, etc.) needed additional information from the Product Manager. As a result, the story was handed back, and its placement on the board reflects this as it sits in the "Needs Clarification" column.
Our Value Delivery Manager notes that this story is delayed, waiting for the Product Owner to provide clarification.
The Value Delivery Manager has screenshots of each day in this iteration (Kanban Board Movement Tracking). They have observed and begun inquiring about the cause(s) for the delay of this story. Figure 7 is the daily screenshots of team Super-Terrific's Kanban board. Please take a moment and see how simple yet informative tracing a story is. Follow the red triangle, and you will see the progression of this story.
Our story was not completed and will carry over into the next iteration.
Figure 8 is a continuation of this story's journey to reach done. Using this practice, we can glean quite a bit from this visualization. In both iterations, our story has sat in waiting states for days. Our story has moved forward (handoff) and backward (handback) several times. Our story required 19 days from the start through meeting the Product's definition of done. Our Value Delivery Manager will bring awareness to this and collaborate on how the delays can be reduced or eliminated.
What does a Value Delivery Manger do next? They start with the visualization, and the time the story was in the columns on the Kanban Board. Here are a few of the questions they may ask:
Utilizing screenshots with a simple identifier like the red triangle is quite compelling. Once you have the screenshots, tracing requires following the story through the workflow—powerful and requires little effort.
A few other techniques for story tracing are represented in figures 9, 10, and 11.
How can our Value Delivery Manager visualize what is happening in the workflow? They can trace our story with the time spent in team Super-Terrific's Kanban board states, shown in figure 9. In a single visual, this technique speaks the equivalent of many words. Pretty compelling, isn't it?
Figure ten is another technique, showing the trace of our story and time in states using a calendar as the backdrop.
Figure eleven is another technique, showing the trace of our story represented by touch time (tasks to do the work of the story) vs. waiting time. There is a whole lot of waiting going on with our story!
These two practices and the techniques shown are examples of how a Value Delivery Manager, someone who is responsible for and has the capacity available to reduce or eliminate delays in the value stream. By identifying delays and attending to them, significant improvements in flow can be made.
If you want to learn more, please see our options for value stream and delivery management. Learn Value Stream Management & Delivery
About the Author
Joshua Barnes is the founder of Process Mentors; a consultancy focused on improving ways of working. Over the past two decades, Joshua and his staff have had a breadth of engagements, including culture change, increasing productivity while reducing risk and waste, and focusing on the fewest things that significantly impact people, performance, and outcomes.
Joshua’s focus is Disciplined Agile and value stream management, improving the environment in which delivery teams work, thus increasing the flow of value to customers. He is an international speaker, LinkedIn Learning author, host of several live stream series, and a published author.