Flow Efficiency – Where is the Waste in Your Software Delivery Process?

The Flow Efficiency metric is a crucial part of tracking work and delivering value in Innovation Management. By tracking what work is actively being worked on, Creative Leaders can identify waste and wait states, which can lead to bottlenecks in the value stream. Flow Efficiency is the percentage of time that your Flow Items are actively being worked on, and if it’s low, it indicates waste. By measuring Flow Efficiency, you can accurately identify wait times and work to reduce or eliminate bottlenecks. To ensure that work is not stagnating, Flow Efficiency must be tracked based on the Flow Time, which is the elapsed time work takes to be completed from the moment it enters the value stream; this captures waiting time both upstream and downstream, monitoring the process from end-to-end. A high Flow Load and strong cycle time do not necessarily mean that there are no wait states. An organization must use the Flow Framework, which enforces four key states: new, active, waiting, and done. In the real world, the Flow Efficiency metric helped a large US healthcare organization improve its process. They were suffering from too much context switching and high Flow Load when they realized that their Flow Efficiency indicated almost no wait state. By using Flow Metrics in relation to feature work, they could identify the issue, leading to a deeper dive into Flow Metrics, including Flow Time, Flow Velocity, Flow Load, and Flow Distribution.