Bottleneck

Important questions:

  1. Get the right metrics – are you measuring right thing?
  2. Do you understand how value flows across the process?
  3. Can you easily obtain real-time metrics across the process?
  4. Are you able to produce accurate traceability and other performance reports?

The four categories for measuring outcomes:

  1. Time - lead time to deliver business value
  2. Productivity - business value in terms of stories
  3. Cost - cost per story point
  4. Quality - mean time to resolution (MTTR)

Theory of constraints

Taking a scientific approach to identify the primary factor limiting performance, then working on it until it’s no longer a problem. These three tips will get you off to a good start:

  1. Identify your bottleneck
  2. Develop and implement a targeted solution
    1. Identify – what part of the process limits the rate at which goals are achieved?
    2. Exploit – make quick improvements to throughput using existing resources.
    3. Subordinate – ensure all actions are geared towards eliminating the bottleneck, everything else is deprioritised
    4. Elevate – if the above steps don’t help, deploy additional resource. Attack the constraint aggressively until it’s resolved.
    5. Repeat – once the constraint is removed, move on to the next problem causing a bottleneck elsewhere.
  3. Optimise for continuous improvement

Value stream mapping

3 key components:

  1. VA (or PT) - Value added time (or Process time) is the amount of time that a team actually spends working on the project.
  2. LT - Lead time represents the total time it takes a person or team to complete a task—it is the combination of value added and non-value added.
  3. %C/A - % Complete/accurate - his is the percentage of information-based work that is complete and accurate the first time and requires no re-work by downstream processes.

Build your own data-driven stream by following these four steps:

  1. Map out your as-is DevOps stream
  2. Identify waste
  3. Build your to-be DevOps stream
  4. Communicate change to your organization

Common pitfalls with work visibility:

  1. Overestimating the state of organizational knowledge
  2. Failing to map the entire value stream
  3. Focusing on the wrong areas for improvement
  4. Not granting authority to make changes