Agility and Flow: Enablers, Influencers and Impediments of Organization Flow

Ken Power

Workshop: 90 minutes

Summary

Organization Flow is about achieving the Lean concept of Flow at an organization level. The complexity of enabling flow increases as we move from a single product focus to a cross-organization portfolio focus.

This session will describe some core metrics that help organizations, large and small, to understand their capacity and flow. These metrics tell a story about what is happening in the organization. Seeing, interpreting and sharing these stories enables organization learning, continuous improvement and ultimately helps us increase throughput and flow across the value network.

We will look at lessons from these stories, including impediments to flow, and how you can use a Kanban system to identify and manage them. Through this, we will look at ways to understand who and what in the organization is really influencing flow.

You will come away with a core set of metrics you can use to understand flow in your organization, a framework for identifying impediments to flow, and the means to understand and interpret the stories that are being told through these metrics and impediments.

Short Bio

Ken Power is co-founder of Cisco’s CMBU Agile Office, where he is an internal Lean and Agile consultant/coach, working with the organization’s leadership and teams around the world on their continuing agile and lean journey. He is a frequent speaker at major international Lean and Agile conferences and has authored several papers on Lean and Agile product development, including winning the Best Paper award at Agile 2011. Ken is a Fellow of the Lean Systems Society.