Embark with OKALOA Flowlab Workshop - Dec 4th and 5th

On Dec 4th and 5th, a team of 12 leaders across multiple organizations experienced something remarkable by attending Embark with OKALOA Flowlab Workshop - Workflow Simulation Workshop. This workshop provided us a different perspective to coaching the delivery teams for efficiency.

In this blog, I am sharing my 3 top learnings and 3 Action items for all the readers

KEY LEARNING #1:

Agility DNA : Learning - Collaboration - Flow

When we talk about Agile teams in general, we tend to focus more on Learning or collaboration. There is a third dimension for agility i.e., FLOW. Teams in an organization should focus on all these three dimensions of triangle i.e., Learning, Collaboration and Flow. Without the three attributes, there is no sense of Agility. Eg: A team that is learning and collaborates well but that team doesn't deliver value then what is the point of being agile and mentioning we are agile. In this workshop, we had wonderful brainstorming exercise which clarified our thought on these three.

KEY LEARNING #2:

Too much WIP(Work-in-progress) delays value delivery and also burns the team

This was an experimental learning, and the core of the workshop i,e., the simulation. In which we were divided into teams of four and we did 2 rounds of simulations.

Simulation 1:A Bad weather scenario i,e., committing to work as soon as it arrives and no WIP work in progress constraint set. There were rules which were close to the challenges we face in everyday work. At the end of simulation, we learnt 2 things 1. Too much of work was work in progress. 2. Team leader assigns work to team members and the leader get frustrated as no urgent work was delivered, the delivered work is not important.

Simulation 2: We called it good weather/idle scenario, where we have WIP constraint. The magic happened here, we were divided into 3 different teams each team took different WIP limits. one team particularly took lesser work in progress and collaborated extremely well by learning and experimenting each round. This team could deliver more , also this team was predictable At the end the learnings were, Since there was less work in progress the number of blockers they were less that means the team kept things in control to focus on urgent and important work.

* The simulation not only taught us the WIP limit , it also helped us to understand Littles Law-> which made clear that more the WIP is directly proportional to more lead time.

* This also gave me access to free resource to train and coach teams on, WHY WIP plays a key role.

KEY LEARNING #3 :

Upstream(Triage/Refine) is Super important to deliver value faster

Now we understood we have to limit WIP but to limit WIP what plays the key role, committing to work ,understanding what is the work, this is called UPSTREAM. Understanding about the problem is important to commit to the problem and time ,it takes to solve the problem. The discussion on this had made my understanding clear about UPSTREAM. Upstream is not hierarchy .Upstream is triaging/refining the work so that it can be committed for completion.

I would like to add a story here, I had a problem with an application sync, I called the customer care raised a complaint, when I asked the ETA - The customer care executive response was, in the next 48 hours the ticket gets assigned. After the ticket gets assigned in 6 hours problem will be diagnosed and root cause will be shared. After the root cause is shared we will let your know how long it will take to fix the root-cause. I was awestruck with the predictability of their system.

To Summarize,

My Key Learnings are:

#1 : -> Agility emerges from Flow, Collaboration and Learning

#2 : -> Limit the work in progress to deliver sooner and increase your feedbacks loops.

#3 : -> Upstream is super important to deliver faster.

My Recommended 3 Action items to the readers are:

1: Connect with the Patrick Steyaert and Arlette Vercammen to understand more about the simulations they are the creators of this!

2: Get your leader and teams take part of this workshop to experience flow and simulate the real world scenarios and to optimize your flow of knowledge work.

3: I have tagged my Co-Learners, please DM and understand their experiences as well to get more motivated to do Step 1 and Step 2.

Cheers!