Flow Engineering Program
The Visible Flow Engineering Template
Are you tired of efforts bogged down with bottlenecks, miscommunication, and unrealized potential? Do you dream of streamlined processes, maximized value delivery, and a team aligned towards a shared vision? Then it's time to embrace the power of Flow Engineering. This comprehensive template, based on the practices outlined in the book "Flow Engineering," provides a structured and collaborative environment to guide your team through the entire Flow Engineering program, from initial assessment to actionable roadmap.
This Miro template is a visual workspace and canvas designed to facilitate your creation of the Five Key Maps of Flow Engineering: Outcome Mapping, Value Stream Mapping, Dependency Mapping, Future State Value Stream Mapping, and Flow Roadmapping. It's more than just a collection of frames; it's a guided journey, empowering teams to visualize, analyze, and optimize their processes for maximum flow. It provides context, prompts, and examples for each stage, ensuring a consistent, efficient, and effective approach to Flow Engineering.
The template is structured around the Five Key Maps, with dedicated sections for each:
Outcome Mapping: This section helps define clear and measurable outcomes for your program. It guides you through identifying goals, pains, needs, context and the desired objective you want to achieve. It encourages collaborative brainstorming and prioritization of outcomes, ensuring everyone is aligned towards the same target. This prepares you to effectively identify and scope your target value stream.
Current State Value Stream Mapping: This section focuses on visualizing your current work flow. It provides the structure to map the steps, identify bottlenecks, and measure key metrics like lead time, cycle time, and value-added vs. non-value-added activities. The template includes simple structure and guidance for value stream mapping, ensuring consistency and clarity. It facilitates collaborative analysis of the current state, enabling teams to pinpoint areas for improvement.
Dependency Mapping: This section helps uncover the often-hidden dependencies that can impact flow. It guides you in identifying internal and external dependencies, as well as resource constraints and potential risks. By visualizing these dependencies, you can proactively address them and prevent future disruptions. The template provides guidance for digging deeper into constraints and bottlenecks, allowing teams to laser-focus on the most critical factors impacting performance.
Future State Value Stream Mapping: This section is dedicated to designing your optimized future state. Based on the insights gained from the previous maps, you'll collaboratively design a streamlined process, eliminating waste, reducing bottlenecks, and maximizing value. The template provides tools for simulating different scenarios and evaluating the potential impact of changes. It encourages creative problem-solving and fosters a shared vision for the future state.
Flow Roadmapping: This section helps translate your future state vision and gathered insights into an actionable plan. It guides you in prioritizing improvement initiatives, assigning ownership, and defining measures of progress. The template provides a framework for creating a visual roadmap that clearly articulates the steps needed to achieve the desired future state. It facilitates ongoing tracking and monitoring of progress, ensuring the plan stays on track.
Beyond these core maps, the template also includes sections for:
Team Collaboration: Dedicated spaces for team introductions, meeting agendas, and action item tracking, promoting effective communication and collaboration throughout the process.
Resources & References: Links to helpful articles, videos, and templates related to Flow Engineering, providing a supportive repository of knowledge and practices.
What does it help you achieve?
Define and focus on value: By gathering perspective and information from the working group, refocus on zero in on your highest value target outcome.
Identify and eliminate bottlenecks: By visualizing the entire process flow, you can pinpoint areas of waste, delay, and inefficiency, allowing for targeted improvements.
Maximize value delivery: By focusing on value-added activities and eliminating non-value-added steps, you can optimize your processes to deliver maximum value to your customers.
Improve collaboration and communication: The template provides a shared workspace for teams to collaborate, brainstorm, and align on a common vision.
Accelerate process improvement: The structured approach and pre-built frameworks accelerate the process of analyzing, designing, and implementing improvements.
Create a culture of continuous improvement: By embedding Flow Engineering principles into your team's DNA, you can foster a culture of ongoing optimization and innovation.
Achieve measurable results: By defining clear outcomes and tracking progress against your roadmap, you can demonstrate the impact of your Flow Engineering efforts.
Gain a shared understanding of the process: The visual nature of the maps facilitates a shared understanding of the process, ensuring everyone is on the same page.
Proactively manage dependencies: By identifying and visualizing dependencies, you can mitigate potential risks and prevent future disruptions.
Who would benefit from it most?
This template is ideal for:
Product Managers: Optimize product development processes, reduce time to market, and deliver high-quality products that meet customer needs.
Project Managers: Streamline project execution, improve team collaboration, and deliver projects on time and within budget.
Process Improvement Specialists: Facilitate process analysis and optimization initiatives, identify areas for improvement, and implement effective solutions.
Team Leaders: Empower their teams to identify and solve process challenges, foster a culture of continuous improvement, and achieve shared goals.
Business Analysts and Architects: Analyze current state processes, identify opportunities for improvement, and design future state solutions.
Anyone involved in process improvement initiatives: Regardless of role or title, anyone who wants to improve the way work gets done will benefit from this template.
Flow Engineering can support both project and long-lived cross-functional teams, matrix and functional organizations, distributed or remote teams, and any org structure, at any scale.
How to use it:
Create a copy: Start by creating a copy of the template in your own Miro workspace.
Invite your team: Invite your team members to collaborate on the board.
Start with Outcome Mapping: Begin by defining the desired outcomes for your program. Use the provided frameworks and prompts to identify stakeholders, their needs, and the changes you want to achieve.
Map the Current State: Next, map the current process flow using the Value Stream Mapping section. Use the standardized conventions provided in the template.
Identify Dependencies: Use the Dependency Mapping section to uncover any internal or external dependencies that impact your key constraint.
Design the Future State: Based on the insights gained from the previous maps, design your optimized future state using the Future State Value Stream Mapping section.
Create a Flow Roadmap: Translate your future state vision into an actionable plan using the Flow Roadmapping section. Prioritize initiatives, assign ownership, and define measures of progress.
Report Findings: Fill in the included executive summary to communicate your results and catalyze your future efforts.
Communicate ROI: Use your current and future state data to communicate expected ROI of your action items.
This Flow Engineering Miro template is your key to unlocking seamless flow, maximizing value delivery, and creating a culture of continuous improvement. Start using it today and transform the way your team works!
FAQs
Is this only for software teams?
While focused on software delivery, Flow Engineering can improve outcomes for any process delivering value, including incident response, infrastructure automation, or sales.
Who guides this process?
An experienced external facilitator is recommended to provide an unbiased perspective, ask insightful questions, maximize session efficiency and value, and keep teams engaged. An experienced facilitator can save hours of wasted time and effort in each session and find hidden opportunities worth millions of dollars and months of time.
Who participates in mapping?
Include representatives from all responsible parties in the value stream, including leadership. We aim for 12 or fewer participants.
When should we do this?
Start as soon as possible to gain performance visibility. Repeat every 6 months to reassess progress and identify new improvement opportunities.
How do we get accurate results?
You need accuracy only where it matters. Initial relative measurements are sufficient to find your key opportunities, then we dig into further detail where there’s value. More precise measurements can be added later if needed. We want insights fast, so we focus on just enough detail to understand and act effectively.
What does this really look like?
The process involves 4-6 two-hour sessions to define, analyze, and design the target value stream. Maps can be combined or kept separate and easily shared across the organization.
Flow Engineering vs. Other Techniques
Flow Engineering makes it possible to incorporate any flow-improvement techniques that can help deliver value and provides a clear structure to layer them in. There are two main advantages that Flow Engineering brings to any practice: Initial clarity on a target outcome and an actionable, owned, measurable roadmap to achieve the outcome.
Diving into data: Data can take months to get access to, clean, organize, validate, and correlate, and even then it’s still subject to opinion and interpretation. Even without value stream mapping, outcome mapping helps to clarify what data is most valuable, and a flow roadmap translates the data into action.
Flow Chart / Process Map / SIPOC / KPIV/KPOV / Swimlane: Flow Engineering includes the same measurement of timing, quality, staff and more to reveal insights about the real performance of the process and workflow being represented, but it also starts with more clarity, and ends with action.
EventStorming: More focused on technical architecture and software solution design, and doesn’t provide the same level of workflow detail or connection to value. Once a constraint has been identified through Flow Engineering, EventStorming can be used to analyze the specific area affected and design a technical solution.
Flow Engineering vs. Traditional Value Stream Mapping
Flow Engineering provides a more lightweight, flexible, and outcome-oriented approach to traditional value stream mapping that is well-suited for modern digital organizations seeking to improve flow, fast. Karen Martin, the author of the canonical Value Stream Mapping wrote the foreword for Flow Engineering, and endorses it as lightweight, rapid approach better suited to getting started with flow.
Simplified and accessible approach - Flow Engineering provides a simplified, easy-to-start version of value stream mapping that is more accessible to novice facilitators and teams new to the practice.
Focus on rapid results - The Flow Engineering approach emphasizes quick mapping sessions (2-3 hours) to generate insights and enable action rapidly, rather than lengthy, exhaustive (and exhausting!) traditional mapping exercises.
Digital-native and remote-friendly - The mapping techniques are designed to work well in virtual/digital environments, making them suitable for remote and distributed teams.
Integrated with other mapping techniques - Value stream mapping is integrated with other complementary mapping exercises like Outcome Mapping and Dependency Mapping to provide a more holistic view.
Emphasis on constraint identification - There is a strong focus on quickly identifying the key constraint or bottleneck in the value stream to enable targeted improvement efforts.
Designed for knowledge work - The approach is tailored for knowledge work and digital product development contexts, rather than manufacturing processes.
Flexible and adaptable - The techniques are presented as flexible patterns that can be adapted to different team needs and contexts.
Aligned to business outcomes - Outcome Mapping ensures the value stream efforts are tied to clear business outcomes and value.
No jargon or cryptic symbols - Value Stream Mapping traditionally has a large library of symbols and terminology specific to manufacturing. Flow Engineering puts the information on the map where it naturally speaks to the viewer - whether they’re making the map or seeing it for the first time.
Bridges business and technology - The simplified visual approach helps create shared understanding between business and technical stakeholders.
Roles and Responsibilities
Facilitator: Leads Flow Engineering effort end-to-end.
Sponsor/Accountable Leader: Representative supporting the Flow Engineering effort.
Working Group: Contributors from across the value stream(s) to actively participate in mapping exercises.
Example Session Agendas
SESSION #0: Discovery Deep Dive (1 hour)
Objective: Define where we are and where we should focus
Outcome: Clear understanding of the current state landscape: Identified pains, goals, ideas, questions & context.
Deliverables: Discovery Map
Activities:
Collect and associate pains, goals, ideas, context, and questions.
Shape and consolidate outcomes.
Focus and alignment on 1-3 target outcomes.
SESSION #1: Outcome Mapping (1 hour) [typically combined with Discovery]
Objective: Work backward from target outcomes to clarify the next steps.
Outcome: Definition of 1-3 target outcomes, with a clear understanding of value, obstacles, and suggested parallel next steps.
Deliverables: Outcome Map
Activities:
Identify 1-3 target outcomes.
Assess value to customers, businesses, and contributors.
Identify obstacles, challenges, and blind spots.
Define possible parallel next steps.
SESSION #2: Current State Value Stream Mapping (2 hours)
Objective: Visualize the current flow in the value stream that aligns with target outcomes.
Outcome: A visualized and well-defined current state value stream, with key steps and timing identified and optional data layers for deeper analysis.
Deliverables: Current State Value Stream Map
Activities:
Visualize the current state value stream.
Define steps and timing.
Optional: Add data layers such as quality, value-add, artifacts, etc., based on time and goals.
SESSION #3: Dependency Analysis (2 hours)
Objective: Visualize and analyze critical constraints, and causal factors.
Outcome: Visualized dependencies impacting key hotspots, with assessed impacts and potential mitigation tactics outlined.
Deliverables: Dependency Map
Activities:
Map dependencies impacting key hotspots.
Assess impacts.
Extract potential mitigation tactics.
SESSION #4: Future State Value Stream Mapping (2 hours)
Objective: Design the flow for the value stream that aligns with target outcomes, using gathered insights.
Outcome: A synthesized and designed future state value stream, along with kaizen improvement actions and experiments identified.
Deliverables: Future State Value Stream Map
Activities:
Synthesize findings and insights.
Design the improved future state value stream.
Identify kaizen improvement actions and experiments.
SESSION #5: Flow Roadmapping (2 hours)
Objective: Plan how and when outcomes will be delivered.
Outcome: A roadmap for delivering target outcomes, with clear timelines, deliverables, measurements, methods, and ownership.
Deliverables: Flow Roadmap
Activities:
Collect and prioritize kaizen experiments and actions
Address dependencies
Plot priority across time horizons: Now, next, later.
Define deliverables, measurements and/or methods, and ownership.
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