Power the Flow of Your Work with Flow Efficiency
Flow Efficiency is the percentage of time where work is in an active state and is a metric to expose wait time.
Stephen Angood of SPA Agile Consulting shares an excellent Youtube learning series on Agile & Lean ways of working, Flow and frameworks like Scrum, Kanban & eXtreme Programming.
In this tutorial he shows you how to start using Lean and flow metrics in Scrum so you can start getting more things done faster, provide leadership with accurate and reliable due dates, covering:
- Cycle Time.
- Throughput.
- Limit WIP.
- Reduce Context Switching.
- Flow Efficiency.
- Work Item Age.
- Flow Metrics in Scrum Ceremonies.
Flow Efficiency
In this tutorial he focuses in on the ‘Flow Efficiency’ metric.
What is flow efficiency? Understanding your flow efficiency is a great first step to improving your cycle time and forecasts with Monte Carlo Simulation, particularly if you’re starting out with flow metrics. It helps you identify problem areas with your process and apply interventions to improve. This video shows you how to calculate it and what to do once you know what it is.
Flow Efficiency is the percentage of time where work is in an active state and is a metric to expose wait time. Flow efficiency metrics can easily help in identifying when waste is decreasing or increasing in a process.
Using Jira to explain the principles Stephen demonstrates how to classify your work items in such a way you can identify the items that should be included or excluded to calculate your own Flow Efficiency. He then shares practical insights on understanding what may be causing this to be at a low level and steps you can take to improve it.
