IMPROVING FLOW IN ORGANIZATIONS

Improve flow in your organization

If your organization is already starting to take steps towards becoming more flow-oriented, it’s a good sign. However, there are probably a few areas where you might still be experiencing either business pain: things are taking too long to get done, or team pain: people being overwhelmed by context-switching and conflicting priorities. If that is the case, then there are probably still some big opportunities for you to make significant improvements.

To become more flow-oriented and enable faster and more reliable software delivery, we recommend that you:

• Take some time to consider why you are doing well in some areas but not others - what constraints might prevent you from progressing in those areas?

• Explore your blockers to flow - where are your blocking dependencies?

• Work with your employees and start to recognize the impact of cognitive load in their day-to-day lives - what can you do to improve that?

• Think about situations where your organization may have evolved while disregarding Conway’s law - what are the implications of that?

• Consider how external actors within your organization might be impacting your teams - are they being pulled in multiple directions with no clear priorities or shared goals?

• Understand the impact of poor design decisions on your team’s morale - is this leading to disengaged and burned-out teams?

• Use the lenses of fast flow and cognitive load to look at things differently and identify opportunities for improvement.

• Start thinking in terms of team-first - how can we encourage and nurture good team-first traits and behaviors, such as the team being the primary delivery mechanism, clear boundaries of ownership and team-sized software?

• Start having conversations about the challenges you are facing using Team Interaction Modelling (TIM) to document snapshots in time and focus the discussion.

• Explore ways to find new boundaries for teams and services using Independent Service Heuristics (ISH) and User Needs Mapping (UNM).

• Assess whether you are utilizing Enabling teams effectively.

The key to making progress may differ depending on your situation, but Team Topologies provides a range of techniques, patterns, practices, and products that could help you on your journey.