From Team Flow to System Flow to Customer Flow
Practical Tools to Keep Valuable Work Moving
fernando@squirrelnorth.com
@fer_cuenca
Fernando Cuenca, AKC, AKT
SQUIRRELNORTH
ALTERNATIVE PATHS TO AGILITY
11th Annual Conference
November 5th, 2019

SquirrelNorth
Tailored Agility
Our
Mission
We focus on pragmatic ways that fit your existing company's
processes, culture and marketplace challenges. We help you identify
where you want to be & the obstacles that are currently preventing
you from being there. We do this by involving everyone at all levels:
sustainable practices for your teams, tools for managers to improve
their services, and approaches for executives to manage risk and
scale across their enterprise.

“Our highest priority is to satisfy the
customer through early and continuous
delivery of valuable software.”

From
someone’s
needs…
… to those needs
being fulfilled.
Flow of Work

Flow of Work
“I promise…”
“Here it is!”Commitment
Point
Delivery
Point
Lead Time

“Deliver working software frequently,
from a couple of weeks to a couple of
months, with a preference to the
shorter timescale.”
Flow

Flow of Work
Product
Design
Software
Development
Compliance
Operations
Design and UX Marketing

Product
Design
Software
Development
Compliance
Operations
Design and UX Marketing

Team Flow
Customer Flow

Prototypical Evolutionary Stages
Loosely-Affiliated
Individuals
Inwards-looking
Teams
System-aware
Teams
Fit-for-Purpose
System of Teams
Sustainable
Service
Unhappy Custom
ers
Happy Customers

Loosely-Affiliated Individuals:
“Process? What’s that?”
• No intentional process
• Not clear what business we’re in, or
who our customer really is
• Inconsistent results, highly dependent
on individuals
• Fragile structure

Inwards-looking Teams:
“Everything revolves around us”
• Inconsistent process
• Poor understanding of who the
Customer is, or what the work really is
• Lack of alignment between people and
groups
• Overburdening, inability to prioritize
• Individual heroics are common
• Unhappy Customers, Overburdened
Workers

System-aware Teams:
“We’re connected, we pull together”
• Consistent process, inconsistent outcomes
• Work is better understood
• Lack of end-to-end visibility and alignment
between groups
• Reliance on heroics from line managers
• Workplace less stressful, more collaborative
• Customers describe the service as unreliable
• Unhappy Customers, Happier Workers

Fit-for-Purpose System of Teams:
“We all put the Customer first!”
• Consistent process and outcomes
• Work is well understood, end-to-end, and is
Customer-recognizable
• Demand & Capability in balance
• Sense of unity and purpose
• No need for heroics
• Customer expectations understood, and met
• Happy Customers, potentially unsustainable

Sustainable Service:
“Everyone is better off if we’re here to stay”
• Consistent economic performance (cost
targets, margins, etc.)
• Work is classified by Customer risk
• Classes of Service offered
• Procedures are followed when under
stress
• Systems Thinking & Quantitative
Decision-making
• Satisfies Customers and Stakeholders in a
sustainable way

“If only we had management support…”

Working your way up

From “Loosely Affiliated Group of Individuals”…
…to “Inwards-looking Teams”
Rudimentary understanding that work is not all the same
Rudimentary understanding of team-level process and workflow

Work
classification
Team
Workflow
Making Team
Commitments
Basic Team
Agreements

5∞
Collaboration &
self-organization
Team WIP limits
Per person WIP
limits
3
Raising blockers

From “Inwards-looking Teams”…
…to “System-aware Teams”
Understand who the customer is, and what's meaningful to them
Gain basic awareness of end-to-end process
Take action on systemic barriers to flow

Code Back-
end ServiceAdd Product
to Shopping
Cart
Add missing
tests to
automation
suite
2+2 = 5
How Come?
Regression
testing for
August
Release
Investigate
DB lock issue
in Server
TO-1
Product
Feature
ProductionIssue
Defect
Paul
Product Manager
Ted
Test Manager
Dev
Team
Ursula
User
Implementation Tasks
ReleaseTesting
Sarah
Sys Admin
Customer Recognizable
Work Types

Downstream WorkflowUpstream Workflow
Extend workflow
understanding upstream
and downstream

Stronger awareness of team
interdependency
Systemic Barriers to Flow

Add Product
to Shopping
Cart
Test server
unavailable
Date: 24/10/2018
Environment
Outage
Missing
Information
SME
availability
Blocker Clustering
Impact prediction

Add Product to
Shopping Cart
Commitment
Point
Rudimentary ability to
measure System Lead Time
Better understanding of
Commitment
Ability to track Aging and
define “trigger” points
0
5
10
15
20
25
1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22 25 28 31 34 37 40 43 46 49 52 55 58
Frequency
Duration (days)
Avg = 5 75th=15
“What
happened
here?”

From “System-aware Teams”…
…to “F4P System of Teams”
Evolve more sophisticated workflow understanding
Increase quantitative awareness
Develop the ability to forecast
Develop basic ability to shape demand
Understand what makes you “fit for purpose” (F4P)

Do we
understand
the feature?
Do we know
how to build
it?
What happens
when we try to
actually
implement it?
Did we build what
we thought we
built?
Is this what the
Business was
really looking for?
What happens
when we integrate
this feature with
the others?
BA Dev Test Deploy
Workflow organized around
the knowledge discovery
process

Explicit modeling of queues
Explicit modeling of
workflow wait steps
Gradual elimination of wait
states
Lead Time
Waiting Waiting WaitingWorking Working WaitingWorking

Team
A
Team
B
Manage dependencies:
peer-to-peer, parent-child

Replenishment Delivery
Decoupled Replenishment &
Delivery Cadences
Deferred Commitment
Manage Flow Here Manage Flow HereManage Flow Here
More granular flow
management

Gradual elimination of
unbounded steps
3∞ 2 3 ∞ ∞ ∞10∞3 5 ∞
WIP Constrained workflows

Service Control Chart
0
5
10
15
20
25
1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22 25 28 31 34 37 40 43 46 49 52 55 58
*
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
Cummulative Flow
Done Build
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
Collect better Demand &
Capability Data
Increase quantitative
awareness
Analyze Customer Fitness-
for-Purpose Criteria
Ability to do probabilistic
forecasting
Flow Predictability
Variation

time
impact
time
impact
time
impact
time
impact
Expedite
Fixed Date
Standard
Intangible
Offer package of Classes of
Service to affect selection
and determine SLA
Commitment
Point
Explicit policies to affect
entry and discard

From “F4P System of Teams”…
…to “Sustainable Service” and Beyond
Increase sophistication for quantitative analysis
More sophisticated workflow management
Develop capability to explicitly allocate capacity
Ability to manage staff liquidity across services
Use explicit buffers to smooth flow Anticipate & Schedule Dependencies
Montecarlo
simulations
Statistical
Decision-making
Utilize hybrid fixed service
teams together with a flexible
labor pool

Back to Evolution…
Loosely-Affiliated
Individuals
Inwards-looking
Teams
System-aware
Teams
Fit-for Purpose
System of Teams
Sustainable
Service
time
performance

Recipe for Evolutionary Change
Stressor
Reflection
Mechanism
Leadership

A look under the hood?

Under the Hood: The KMM
Evolutionary Change Model /
Coaching Model

SQUIRRELNORTH
ALTERNATIVE PATHS TO AGILITY

Fernando Cuenca
Principal Consultant, SquirrelNorth
Fernando started as a developer in the early 90s (C++ used to be his best
friend), discovered Extreme Programming in the early 2000s, carried the “dev
manager” title for a brief period, and became a full time Agile Coach by 2009.
Since then, he has worked for organizations in various industries (such as Finance
& Banking, Oil & Energy, Marketing, Correctional Services, etc.), coaching teams
to better understand the way they do work, introduce technical engineering
practices and help them improve their processes incrementally, drawing from the
Agile and Kanban bodies of knowledge.
His focus these days is working with leadership “above the team” to better
manage the end-to-end flow of work in ways that yield better, systemic results.
He holds a degree in Information Systems Engineering. He is also an Accredited
Kanban Consultant and Trainer.
fernando@squirrelnorth.com
SQUIRRELNORTH
ALTERNATIVE PATHS TO AGILITY