From the course: Learning Lean IT
What is flow?
- Here we see the definition of flow. In IT, you can apply the Lean concept of flow to everything. From your development process, to how you engage consumers, and get and use their feedback, to how you provide support. All of these should be lean, with minimal waste. To achieve flow, you must add or amplify enablers to flow, and remove or reduce blockers to flow. Blockers to flow include waste like handoffs, inspections, and waiting times. Like working around excess inventory or work in progress, or WIP. An IT example this is the DevOps continuous everything approach. Continuous integration, continuous deployment, continuous delivery, continuous feedback, and so on. Enablers include visual management of, and limiting work in progress, or WIP, reducing the size of batches worked on, in agile and DevOps, the concept of minimum viable product, and managing queue length. Here we see the definition of continuous flow, which is also called one piece flow, single piece flow, and make one, move one. This idea is core to agile development, where we produce things in smaller chunks, and more frequent intervals, and in DevOps practices, where we automate for continuous everything. A value stream needs to flow to deliver value. Ideally, flow should be continuous, with each unit of work entering the flow being carried out without interruption. Continuous flow, requires getting the right materials and information to the right people, with the right skills, knowledge, mindset, and resources, including technology, into the right processes, in the right place, at the right time every time. This is the concept of just-in-time. Here we see the definition of just-in-time. The idea is to enable flow, by driving to eliminate lead time, delays, including those due to excess inventory, and defects. Enablers of continuous flow pick up on the just-in-time idea, including Kanbans that reduce queue length, and enable faster deployments, agile development tat works in smaller increments, and test-driven development, where you write a test that fails before writing code, and automate testing. Agile IT teams strive to achieve continuous flow, moving new features quickly, from concept to cache. They use visual management tools, or Kanban, to see and limit work in process. They work in shorter sprints, or smaller chunks of work. They improve flow through automation of testing, compliance, and infrastructure of everything.
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