For many years I’ve specialized in helping organizations improve how work flows across teams, departments, and systems to deliver meaningful results. One of the most commonly used tools in that effort is value stream mapping (VSM)—a powerful technique from Lean that…
You can’t improve what you can’t see.
This is the fourth article in our series, From Busy to Flowing, which explores how to unlock sustainable agility by improving how work flows through your organization—not just how busy your teams are.
So far, we’ve:
This article is the third in the From Busy to Flow series, which explores what it takes to unlock sustainable agility by improving the flow of work. In the previous article, we examined key metrics for measuring flow across an organization. This post builds on that…
This is the second article in our 10-article series: From Busy to Flowing – Unlocking Sustainable Agility. In the first article, we challenged the idea that keeping people busy leads to better results. Now, we turn to a fundamental question for any team or leader…
This is the first article in our 10-week series: From Busy to Flowing – Unlocking Sustainable Agility. In last week’s kickoff, Why Flow Efficiency Matters More Than Ever in an Era of Cost Cutting, we explored why focusing on flow is essential in today’s cost-conscious…
This article serves as the kickoff to our upcoming 10-week series: From Busy to Flowing – Unlocking Sustainable Agility. In the weeks ahead, we’ll dive deep into the practical strategies and system-level thinking organizations can use to improve flow efficiency—moving…
In every Scrum class I get asked how to deal with interrupt-driven work. Scrum is very effective when dealing with planned work, but what about unplanned work that appears during a sprint? Can we use Scrum to deal with both plan-driven and interrupt-driven work? Yes, if…
Most organizations that employ agile ways of working, like Scrum, focus on self-organizing teams. In these organizations, operational decisions are delegated to teams, whose members have the most detailed knowledge of the consequences and practicalities associated with…
“Cash Can’t Code!” A colleague of mine (Chris Conrad) once told me this. The context of our discussion was about leveraging more resources to complete a large book of work by the end of the year. His main point is clear, having money to throw at the problem wasn’t going…
As an agile coach I work with many companies and the terms “cross-functional” and “T-Shaped” get tossed about quite a bit. Do they mean the same thing? Certainly, many people use them synonymously.
To avoid confusion when organizing agile teams and larger agile…