Enterprises are moving away from project-based delivery to value-based thinking. Traditional project delivery often leads to complex portfolios of work, unpredictable spend requests, unmanageable resource allocation and teams unable to truly claim ownership for the value they deliver.

With the shift to value-based thinking, pools of value are mapped to an end-to-end Value Stream that connects every stakeholder. The Value Stream is the driver for how teams are organised and it informs the different team topologies (characteristics and skills) required to accelerate flow through the system.

This brings significant benefits. A stream-aligned team owns the value it delivers and sees the value it creates. They become highly engaged and motivated to continuously improve the customer value they deliver. It’s also a more sustainable way to manage work because the tendency to spin up one more project to fix something is removed.

We’re New Zealand’s leading Value Stream Management practice and we can help you map your stream/s, organise your people and skills around them, remove delivery constraints, simplify your portfolio and energise the people at the coalface of value. How are your teams organised?

Creating an environment for your teams to succeed will maximise and accelerate the flow of customer value. They’ll be more engaged, work better together, learn more and own the improvement of the products they’re working on. So why are so many environments so poor?

As organisations grapple with modernising technology, there’s a tendency to focus more on the tech than the social constructs within the enterprise – the human networks that exist in all ‘complex-adaptive systems’ which people rely on to collaborate and solve problems.

Our Ways of Working practice has years of experience understanding systems and the processes and people within them. We work with you to embed appropriate Agile principles that can transform how people work in your context. We aim to create long-lived, self-organising and multi-skilled teams which are empowered to respond, adapt, learn and continuously improve the value delivered to customers.

Transition to better ways of working and harness the power of your people with our Scaled Agile training courses.

To optimise flow, enterprises must provide teams with the right metrics to understand and measure how their work flows in the system. The metrics must be oriented around business outcomes and be framed in a language that can be understood by everyone. Without appropriate metrics, teams are ill-equipped to see constraints and take appropriate actions. Instead, they’re more likely to make sub-optimal, band-aid fixes that ignore the system as a whole.

We use DORA metrics and the Flow Framework® (and its associated metrics) to measure speed, velocity and efficiency across the whole system. We can identify:

• The root cause of constraints at a macro and micro level
• Emerging risks to timelines
• The most burdened and burnt out Value Streams
• Bottlenecks, waste and unnecessary costs

The Framework is a data-driven approach to measure the flow of value in terms of business outcomes – rather than just ‘activity’. Your teams will have the insights they need to make improvements that accelerate flow and keep the outcomes within reach. What are your teams relying on?