There's an excellent video by Nicolas Brown about "How (agile) charts lie." See:
circle.tameflow.com/c/conversations/how-agile-charts-lie
In one section of the video Nicolas expresses deep concerns about the use of Flow Efficiency.
Kevin, one of my community members asked me how "I might help a client get comfortable with the notion of Flow Efficiency assuming they had similar concerns to those Nic raised."
I wouldn't! And here is my full reply:
First, Nic has a concern with the Flow Efficiency Chart. (That is Flow Efficiency over time.)
Please note well: there is not a single page in my books or in my posts where I ever suggest to use Flow Efficiency Charts. In this I agree with Nic that they are not very useful. And it makes absolutely no sense to talk about "average" FE, which is an abomination.
So if anyone is suggesting to use the Flow Efficiency Chart or to use Average Flow Efficiency as a metric, I would say that your client is correct in being very skeptical. In fact they should not use them!
Note well: In general I advise not to use FE as a metric! Though knowing about it, and how to calculate it (correctly) can be very beneficial, because...
Second, I use FE primarily as a Mental Model… to make people think that there is actually "work waiting for workers” inside their system. If you present FE from this perspective, you can give a business reason for why it is important to address that situation.
See my example on page 64 of The Book of TameFlow, or (more funnily) my Twitter thread about 'The Magic Wand Experiment.' There you will have a very convincing argument for why businesses should focus on reducing Wait Time rather than Touch Time.
twitter.com/tendon/status/1524978237692006400
Notice that those two are components of FE. So if you attend to the right part of FE, you can get a lot more juice... while if you attend to the wrong part, you will be losing money.
Third, I use the Flow Efficiency Board both to make it explicit when work is waiting for people, and also as a psychological driver. Again, this is explained in The Book of TameFlow.
In theory, there is no great difference between a Kanban [Doing/Done] column split, and a Flow Efficiency Board's [Waiting for.../... in Process] column split. For any running process, the FE will be the same... But practically the impact is huge.
How do you feel when you read "X is waiting for Kevin" rather than "Kevin is done with X." Which gives a stronger bias to action? You see, we don't care so much about measuring FE.
We care much more about creating the behavioral responses and attitudes that foster higher levels of performance.
In conclusion: while you can measure FE, don't waste any effort in doing so. Instead pickup the Mental Model that underlies the idea of FE, and help people to make operational decisions based on that Mental Model.
You will improve because of the improved understanding, decision making, behaviors and attitudes you develop in the teams - not because you're chasing a metric.
Would you like to discuss more - then please join my weekly huddle on Thursday 17th of November at 19:00 CET.
RSVP here:
circle.tameflow.com/c/events/tameflow-circle-weekly-huddle-e920f5
Steve Tendon
@tendon
I help executives achieve superior financial, operational, organizational and human performance by adopting the power of Flow@Scale™.
