Sustaining Flow of Work
We strictly control work in progress to sustain the flow of work through our system. Failure to control work in progress will create bottlenecks, increase our cost of delay and means that we are spending money on work that is incomplete
Specific Practices
Visualise Process
An alternative to assessing the health of the team is to assess the health of the product they are working on. Product Health focuses on the whole product life-cycle; it covers both rate of development and quality of service. Product Health assessment recognises that the health of many teams is largely determined by the context in which they work. In a scaled environment, multiple teams can participate in the assessment of the same product.
Teams plan work to fill their short-term planning horizon. With a clear understanding of current priorities and the capacity of the team, work items are chosen to satisfy the forthcoming delivery goals. The team elaborates the plan as necessary to ensure that there is a shared understanding of the work that is required.
Sprint Planning is a Scrum event that is held before the start of the sprint to establish the scope and priorities of the coming sprint. Its purpose is for the whole team to establish an agreed sprint goal based on the Product Owner’s view of the value that can be created for the customer. To establish a scope of backlog items that can be got to done. For each backlog item the team decides how done will be achieved.
The capacity of the teams delivering a product constrains the rate at which new features can be added and feature improvements delivered. Sustaining capacity relative to demand over time is important because of the high cost of trying to change quickly. The rate of change of capacity is limited by the requirement for teams to adjust to changing membership and for new team members to acquire the ability to deliver.
To understand our progress effectively we need to ensure that the status of our backlog items accurately reflects the progress that is made. Accurate status updates allow us to gather effective metrics about our work performance as a team. This data supports activity by the team to inspect and adapt, improving its way of working.
The capacity of the teams delivering a product constrains the rate at which new features can be added and feature improvements delivered. Sustaining capacity relative to demand over time is important because of the high cost of trying to change quickly. The rate of change of capacity is limited by the requirement for teams to adjust to changing membership and for new team members to acquire the ability to deliver.
Related Practice Categories
Agile teams continuously seek to improve their working practice, improving quality of service and increasing rate of delivery. The most effective learning is local to the team. They inspect the work that has been done, looking for successes and for problems. They adapt to reinforce practice that leads to success and to remove practice the leads to problems.
