Work keeps piling up between stages
Walk the value stream stage by stage. The longest queue is your constraint, and everything else is invisible until it moves.
A push system moves work forward regardless of whether the next stage has room, so queues back up wherever a stage runs slower than the ones feeding it. A pull system only takes on the next item when there is room, which keeps queues short everywhere.
Most organizations still run push. They have not limited WIP, they do not track cycle time, and they treat test-driven development, CI/CD, and pair programming as luxuries they cannot afford right now. That is backwards. The absence of a pull-based system is exactly what blocks the practices that would let them go faster.
There is also a personal version of this. Flow means both the steady movement of work through a value stream and the state of absorption Csikszentmihalyi identified. Both come down to attention: to the task in front of you, and to whether the system around you is helping you finish it.
What you get
- An eight-stage walk of your value stream, with queue length and wait time
- A finding block for the constraint and why work piles up there
- A three-step sequence for turning one stage from push to pull
- Why the organizational and personal kinds of flow are the same problem
Where should we send it?
One email with the worksheet. You can unsubscribe from anything else in one click.
On its way
Check your inbox. If it has not landed in a minute or two, look in promotions or spam, and add sam@startuppatterns.com to your contacts so the rest arrive.
Adapted from the Delivery chapter of The Mindful Product Company by Sam McAfee.