NextLevelAgileThinking “PUSH-PULL-FLOW”

NextLevelAgileThinking “PUSH-PULL-FLOW” … sorry if you think “pulling work” is the best way ever – if every team pulls his work – then you probably lose ~30% of your capacity!!! What? Can’t be true - am I right?

Here is the explanation: PUSH simply leads to an overload of all teams. Multitasking, mistakes and muda (aka “unwanted work”) will be your daily business – poor output is the result.

With PULL (in the middle) it’s already better – every team is somehow well loaded out of their perspective – but wait! Do you know about this constraint stuff from E. Goldratt “The goal”? Then you know that in a complex system everything is somehow coupled with everything else and there is always a #constraint, that determines the overall output.

If you accept this, then you see that even when all teams are loaded full – most of the teams are working for things that will never pass through the constraint – they work on waste! And this is often something around 30%! So, PULL is not bad, but far below the potential.

Ok and what’s different with FLOW? First, you identify the #constraint, then you move very few but suiting resources to the constraint to help, so capacity increases – meaning more other stuff can go through and overall efficiency goes up even if the rest of the teams are not fully loaded!

That is the power of FLOW – out of the experience with quite a few customers with FLOW it’s often possible to double the #throughput – without additional costs!