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How to Stabilize your System

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10 views

How to Stabilize your System

Uploaded by

Alfred Nathaniel Flores
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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How to Stabilize

Your System
By Carmen DeArdo, Planview Principal Flow Advisor

The first order of business to improve a system work more quickly to be available to be pulled
is to stabilize it. To stabilize a system, you must into create.
first determine why the system has more work-
in-progress than it can deliver within the current • Stuck in Create: When work is all prepped for
measured flow time. development and waiting to enter their queue,
you likely have a case of demand overproduction.
There are a number of reasons a system may be This is a form of waste, as the prepped work
accruing too much WIP, and it changes for each will not be delivered within a meaningful market
work profile (feature, defect, risk and debt flow time frame. These great ideas will lose value
items). Let’s dive into that. and grow stale. Some value streams can have
many months (or even years!) of work waiting to
start development, limited by the capacity of the
“It is not enough to just do your developers on the value stream.

best or work hard; You must know • Stuck in Release: This is where developers have
what to work on.” completed their work, but the feature is now
waiting for the release process, e.g. UAT, release
− W. Edwards Deming certification, or performance and security testing.

If work is starting but getting blocked downstream


in either the Create or Release phases, it’s important
Features to identify where and why. You should not start new
work that will likely suffer the same fate.
When feature work accumulates, it’s usually in three
places:
If there is a traffic jam downtown, we don’t want to
let more cars on that will just add to this pileup. If
• Stuck in Ideate: At the far left side of your work
there is an abundance of buildup of feature work,
intake process (known as “Ideation”) waiting to
consider working on other types of work that can
be analyzed, broken down and prioritized for
be done more quickly and independently (e.g. an
development. If the create phase has capacity
independent enhancement story which improves
for new work, then this is a situation where more
the UX experience and can deliver value quickly or
capacity at the product owner, manager, design
a defect) while you’re working on addressing your
or business analyst roles may be needed to flow
constraint.
Defects ongoing neglect will unduly expose your business
to security and compliance risks and cripple your
When the majority of your WIP is defect work, it’s innovation roadmap.
advised to investigate the quality issue generating
these issues and taking capacity away from In closing, in order to understand and better utilize
value-generating work like features. Compare the your Flow Metrics, it is necessary to ensure your
distribution of defects in your flow to good practices underlying system is stable and if not, work to
for your product life cycle stage. If it’s out of whack, identify the contributing factors that are creating
you’ll want to course-correct. this instability.

I will leave you with a final quote from Deming


Risks and Debts from his classic book “Out of Crisis”.

If debt and risk items dominate your WIP, it’s “People generally want to do the right thing, but
likely these work items are never given priority in a large organization, they frequently don’t really
to be completed in a timely fashion. This type of understand what is the right thing.”

© 2023 PLANVIEW, INC., ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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