How to Improve Flow By Focusing on Exceptions

How to deal with the sluggish flow of work

Last week, I was discussing with a team lead who thinks her team is not focused enough on handling exceptions, which are becoming the norm, causing velocity/throughput to go down, and creating an overall feeling of sluggishness.  

Visualize flow exceptions

We agreed to visualize these exceptions to focus the conversation on them.

Detecting Flow Issues using Early Warning Cycle Time Charts shares a few ways to provide an early warning for these exceptions. (The Professional Scrum with Kanban formalized this approach in what we introduced as the Work Item Aging flow metric)

But what we noticed was that having the data isn’t enough. Nobody looked it at. We needed the right place to leverage it. 

Where and when to manage flow exceptions

We found that having the daily meeting focus on exceptions helped the team.

Even more importantly, it focused them on the process and artifacts that can help them tackle these flow exceptions. This created a chain effect of them continuing to fine-tune their process and interactions to streamline their flow.

This reminds me of something Jim Benson talked about. A case study where they visualized the longest-lived items as a large, visible chart, and within minutes, the longest-lived items disappeared from the list. It is just a matter of what you look at…

Being intentional about managing flow exceptions

Once you see a flow exception, how will you handle it?

What I’ve seen great teams do is have an explicit conversation as part of their Definition of Workflow about how they will handle an item that has become a flow exception, with examples like:

• We will try to swarm.

• We will try harder to slice the item into more manageable-sized slices.

• We will meet more frequently to see if there’s anything we can do to expedite or deal with risks/issues.

• We will pull in THE specialist for this work and pair with them.

I’ve seen how just having these intentional conversations drives an improvement in awareness and focus on flow issues.

What’s your approach to visualizing, managing, and tackling flow exceptions?