Understanding Flow Distribution – Getting Your Priorities Straight

Flow Distribution is a metric that helps development teams have an important conversation with the business about how trade-offs impact the business, and how to prioritize business initiatives. It's the proportion of Flow items (features, defects, debt, risk) in a specific value stream that can be adjusted depending on the need to maximize business value. It can also be set for an entire organization to deliver a high-level business goal. Flow Distribution provides a common language between business and IT so collaborative decisions can be made around software delivery to achieve innovation velocity. The metric allows business leaders to do the same kind of planning that product and engineering teams do as a matter of course. Flow Metrics—from Dr. Mik Kersten’s the Flow Framework—provide business and IT leadership with a critical window into the enigmatic world of enterprise software delivery.