Factors for Effective Value Streams

This is a chapter from The Amplio Consultant Educators Toolkit. The book covers the content aspects of Amplio University - a new type of live, affordable training.

This chapter is modified from the corresponding chapter in Al Shalloway and Paula Stewart's book Being an Effective Value Coach: Leading by Creating Value.

“If we dive deep enough, we’ll find that there are very few elements at the base - the root causes— which through cause-and-effect connections are governing the whole system.” Dr. Eli Goldratt from The Choice

A video on these factors is here.

Factors for effective value streams list the primary aspects of what makes value streams effective. While theoretically just knowing first principles could guide people, using them directly is a bit abstract for many people. The factors for effective value streams provide a concrete way to see if the workflows in value streams are effective. They take the theory of first principles and make them more actionable.

They provide us with a way of looking at complex situations, allowing us to make decisions based on a few factors. Making decisions about how to do our work is complicated. We need a guide to help us see which of two or more options is better. Factors for effective value streams indicate how well we are doing and whether a new way of working will improve.

While there are hundreds of factors that can affect our value streams, Amplio Foundations has identified the ten it considers most useful in making decisions on workflows. These factors' origins go back to Al Shalloway’s analysis of hundreds of Agile improvement endeavors, looking to see what worked and what didn’t. To keep things manageable, the 10 most significant factors were identified.

In a nutshell, the factors for effective value streams codify how first principles show up in practice.

The factors for effective value streams are used to both identify challenges in workflows and to help select which practice would be best for the teams involved.

Time for reflection

At first glance, the interactions of forces in value streams appear chaotic without a clear pattern. However, it is possible to discover the “very few elements at the base—the root causes— which through cause-and-effect connections are governing the whole system” that Goldratt refers to in his theory of inherent simplicity.

Consider when you were introduced to an organization where your immediate reaction was, “Wow, this place is cool. I can see why they get so much done!”

Now, consider when you were introduced to an organization where your immediate reaction was, “Wow, this place is horrible. How do they get anything done?”

You are likely reacting to your tacit knowledge –what you know but are not always consciously aware of. Consider what factors you are looking at. For example, are people talking to each other? How busy are they? These factors are likely present in both situations, but they are being done well in one direction, and in the other, they are not. Consider how consistent these tacit judgments are in different places.

The factors for effective value streams are intended to focus on understanding value, ensuring quality, and eliminating delays and waste in the flow of work.? They are highly correlated with an organization’s ability to create and deliver value that leads to success. By attending to these, better decisions can be made on how to work than when they are not attended to.

These factors are stated as scalars. That is, they just point in the direction we want to achieve. There are four ways to use them by converting them into questions. These are:

• How well are we implementing these?
• How can we improve these?
• Will a proposed change improve or hurt these factors?
• What challenges occur when we don’t implement these well?

We’ll show how to use these in the next section.

1 Working on the most valuable items to achieve success for your stakeholders. This will increase your overall value delivery even if you don't improve your efficiency. This is also a great way to manage work in process.

2. Understanding the acceptance criteria before writing any code. This is part of what is called the Definition of Done. Before creating something, you need to know what it’s expected to look like. The acceptance criteria can be in the form of objectives to meet. They may also change as you learn. And they will help avoid writing code that isn’t necessary. Perhaps most importantly, the conversation about the acceptance criteria leads to greater alignment.

3. Getting actionable feedback quickly on your product and on how you are working. Knowledge work is complex, and the challenge of complexity is that it obscures what’s going on. Using what we know to get quick feedback provides this visibility and enables us to avoid large mistakes by identifying and addressing small mistakes. Most of the factors for effective value streams involve supporting this key factor.

4. Working in small increments. Eli Goldratt (creator of The Theory of Constraints) once observed, "Often reducing batch size is all it takes to bring a system back into control.” One reason is that you get actionable feedback more quickly no small increments, which enables you to pivot with less cost. It also lowers the amount of work to do because the size of the work is smaller.

5. Keeping workload within capacity. When people are overworked, multi-tasking happens. This lowers their efficiency by 20-40%. People also end up waiting for each other, injecting delays into other people’s workflows since they must wait for the overworked person to be available. This creates additional work. Overloading people makes them less efficient, gives them even more work to do, and makes teams less efficient.

6. Managing work in process at all levels to reduce delays and handoffs in your workflow. This works with “keep workload within capacity.” This can be accomplished by gating what comes in and focusing on finishing at the story, feature, and release level. When looking for something to work on, first, see if you can help finish something your team is working on.

7. Organizing people to minimize handoffs and delays in the workflow. How people are organized significantly impacts handoffs and delays, which cause waste. Cross-functional teams, when applicable, are the best way to handle this, but there are other ways to organize people.

8. Clarity about how people work together. Having an explicit workflow is very important. This enables people to understand the agreed-upon best ways of working. It’s just a clear understanding of what we have agreed to as the best way of working at any point in time. It is fine to “do what you think is right” at any step.

9. Making all work visible so people can see what they need to do. It also enables management to see the progress of work and not require continual status reports.

10. Focusing on the quality of the product. Product quality is important to make stakeholders happy because poor product quality usually takes more work to modify. It also tends to take more work to support. High product quality is important both for increasing value to the customer and to avoid creating waste.

[1] A handback is when one person hands some work to someone else, and then later they hand it back.

These factors can be used to determine if a new practice would work better than the current one.

The factors work together

It is essential to notice how the factors work together. As you improve one, it either improves the others or makes it easier to improve them. For example, notice how working on small items will help us achieve quicker feedback. This is consistent with Dr. Eli Goldratt’s view that work principles are harmonious. He called this “Inherent Simplicity” in his and his daughter’s seminal book “The Choice” and contends that complex problems are more straightforward than they look if one knows where to look.

Let’s look at a few of the interactions between these factors:

• Small work items are easier to get feedback on
• Pull methods are the best way to keep workload within capacity
• Having work and workflow be visible enables collaboration
• Working in one value stream makes it easier to keep workloads within capacity

There are of course, many, many others. The critical point is that they usually enhance and virtually never work against each other. They are in harmony.

The factors for effective value streams provide a holistic view by attending to different aspects of a system. This makes them very useful.

Many ways to use the factors for effective value streams

How we use the factors for effective value streams

These factors can be used in several ways. They provide us with a base of what to look at to understand our workflows. Converting them into questions often helps in this. For example, if we wanted to assess whether we are manifesting them, we could use the following questions:

1.???? Are we working on the most valuable items to achieve success for our stakeholders?????

2.???? Do we understand the acceptance criteria before we write any code?

3.???? Are we getting actionable feedback quickly on our product and on how we are working?

4.???? Are we working in small increments?

5.???? Is our workload within capacity?

6.???? Are we managing work in process at all levels to reduce delays in our workflow?

7.???? Have we organized our people to avoid multi-tasking and delays in people being available?

8.???? Do we have clarity on how people are working together?

9.???? Is all work visible?

10.? Are we focusing on the quality of the product?

By asking them as questions, we can see how well we are manifesting them.

We can also use these to brainstorm. Consider:

1.???? How can we work on the most valuable items to achieve success for our stakeholders?????? ????

2.???? How can we understand the acceptance criteria before we write any code?

3.???? How can we improve getting actionable feedback quickly on our product and on how we are working?

4.???? How can we work in small increments?

5.???? How can we lower workload to within capacity?

6.???? How can we manage work in process at all levels to reduce delays in our workflow?

7.???? How can we organize our people to avoid multi-tasking and delays in people being available?

8.???? How can we have clarity on how people are working together?

9.???? How can we make all work visible?

10.? How can we focus on the quality of the product?

We can also look to see what happens when we don’t do these well. This can give us a way to go from our challenges to creating an action plan for improvement.

1. If we are not working on the most valuable items to achieve success for our stakeholders then we won’t be producing as much value as possible because we’re spending time on less important items. This will likely cause us to work beyond our capacity.

2. If we don’t understand the acceptance criteria before we write any code then expect a considerable amount of rework to be required.

3. If we aren’t getting actionable feedback quickly on our product and on how we are working then expect small errors to become big problems because we won’t find them quickly.

4. If we are not working in small increments then expect to have higher levels of work in process than necessary and a delay in getting feedback on what value we are producing.

5. If our workload is beyond capacity then expect to have people multi-task and for there to be delays in the workflow which will create waste.

6. If we are not managing work in process at all levels to reduce delays and handoffs in our workflow then we will not only delay feedback (see #1) but we will create waste in the process.

7. If we haven’t organized our people to avoid multi-tasking and delays in people being available ?then we will require having people from multiple teams to get the work done.? This causes a considerable number of handoffs and delays in our workflow. This will significantly slow down getting feedback.

8. If how we are working together is not clear then people will often be working at odds with each other. It will lower alignment.

9. If all work isn’t visible then expect delays in the availability of people required to get the job done. Also, expect management to be misinformed about what’s happening.

10. If we’re not focusing on the quality of the product you can expect to do more work than necessary. This is due to the need to revise what we've done and address quality issues, which will require more effort.

We can also use them to see if a change to a practice will be an improvement. We will discuss this specifically in the chapter How to Improve or Change a Practice.

How We’ve Manifested the Purpose

We started this chapter by stating, “We need a guide to help us see which of two or more options are better.” The Factors for effective value streams ask us questions about how well we are doing. Each question points out whether we follow the first principles of knowledge work.