Aha…. This  Flow Framework looks very promising!

I have just discovered the Flow Framework through the book “From project to product” by Mik Kersten. I must say that, even if I’m only halfway through the book, it already blew me away! I am so excited about it that I plan to make it a series of blog posts here on TFOC as I will keep digging.

The Glue

I have been practicing Agile methodology for more than 10 years now and DevOps for 3 years.  I  am also studying and practicing Lean thinking in my day-to-day work. From the moment I was introduced to Value Streams through “The Phoenix Project”, my journey to understand my own flow of values at work started. It led me to very interesting discoveries until now, but there was something missing.

I was trying to connect all the dots between Lean, Scrum, DevOps, SRE, and even Leadership and Management activities and thinking. How to make our work visible to everyone? How to find bottlenecks in our value streams or even between teams dependent on each other? At Croesus, where I work, we try to manage our technical debt, but not many books talk about it. Why? Is there a way to manage our streams by putting emphasis on business results instead of proxy activity metrics?

This week, I started to read “From project to product”, a book by Mik Kersten.  I got so many “aha” moments on the same day that I got very excited. The Flow Framework seems to be the right framework to enable software companies to visualize the items flowing inside all value streams, making them visible. It also provides all the groundwork to capture the right metrics. Another thing that looks very promising is its ability to not interfere with existing frameworks like Agile Framework, DevOps Tools and principles, etc. Instead, it provides the glue to enable them to work together at a company level.

Stay tuned!

I will definitely give it a try in the next year and I planned to report back here my progress since it looks very promising! Stay tuned for the next parts!