Do you really want to be 100% efficient? - Part 3

Can you be 100% efficient?

The critical thing to remember here is that flow efficiency focuses on how long a piece of work sits idle, not how long team members spend idle. What are some tactics you could use?

One person does all the work.

We could have just one team member work on an item throughout, from start to finish. There are a couple of issues with this. The team member would have to be 100% responsible for quality control. You would have to ensure you have multiple copies of all the expensive equipment available. You would probably have some pieces come out worse, as Sam or Jo might not have Lee’s ability to put that bit of shine. Moreover, you lose all the benefits of having a ‘team’.

In teams, we have people with different strengths for a reason. Lee provides something that Sam or Jo cannot. Teams often combine to form something greater than the sum of its parts, and you lose this if everyone is only worried about their work. Additionally, this robs the organisation of building quality into their processes as each person becomes a one-person shop, and mileage will vary.

Additionally, finding a unicorn that can work effectively in such a manner may be impossible. While you may achieve 100% flow efficiency, other waste and inefficiency will be built into this way of working.

Hire extra people for each stage and the design.

This seems tempting, but again, there are costs. One is the literal cost of extra people, QA and Design.

If you have a dedicated QA introduced into this system, what do they do in their downtime? Furthermore, if we are trying for 100% efficiency, we need 1 QA per smith in case 2 pieces of work are finished simultaneously. This quickly becomes untenable. Some idle time for any worker should be built into the system, but the amount of downtime this suggests seems excessive.

Likewise, hiring a designer might be a great idea, but the finisher and smiths should still be involved. If the designer does all the work with the client, the wrong thing will likely be produced. Information is lost with any handoff, as people fill in the missing data with their assumptions and experience. Whilst the system may end up being 100% efficient from the perspective of a piece being always worked on, this approach would likely introduce other avenues for quality issues and rework. Plus, design time still counts as part of the value stream, so any delay between design and commencement would affect the flow efficiency.

Make all the work the same size and time.

Working with custom pieces and software is very similar in that each piece is unique. Although they may share similarities, little differences in requirements will introduce variance. Forcing each piece to be completed in a set time may cause the smiths (or developers) to skip steps and checks to meet an arbitrary goal. It is helpful to break stories and tasks into consistent sizes to achieve better flow, but artificially compressing work may result in poorer outcomes.

Is it worth it?

One could argue that each of the outcomes above is less than optimal. Yes, it is possible to get to 100% flow efficiency. However, this comes at a stark cost. A system without slack will introduce a lot of waste to the organisation supporting it. It may be direct cost, rework due to quality issues, or even slower delivery times as people try to do things they aren’t good at.

As with many things, efficiency comes with trade-offs and is only one measure of delivering value through flow. Flow efficiency is a lagging indicator that helps you identify opportunities to improve your systems. Use it as such to identify the types of work that may need attention, but do not use it in the absence of other measures. Delivering the wrong thing fast is still delivering the wrong thing.

Ultimately, each team, organisation and business will need to make decisions about how they operate and the goals they strive for. If your team reaches that mark of 35–45% flow efficiency and maintains quality and value to market, you should feel proud. Flow efficiency is a tool, not a single target to focus on.

If you want to learn more about flow, delivery value and other measures that can help you get to where you want to go, feel free to reach out or comment. I’d love to talk.