Monday, February 14, 2005

Thoughts on DOI #1 - Flow

I’d like to dedicate a series of blog entries to explaining my personal take on the Declaration of Interdependence. These posts will represent my own views and not any official view from my co-signatories or the emerging organization behind the declaration.

#1 - Flow

The first statement in the declaration says…

• We increase return on investment by making continuous flow of value our focus

What this means for me is that we first need to treat projects as a flow problem. This is concomitant with Peter Drucker’s idea of a value chain. In a (software) project, the value chain creates consumer value by transforming ideas into working knowledge through a series of transformative steps. This idea was fundamental to the thesis of my book and at the time (2003) I spent rather a lot of words laboring the point in the early chapters. It seems like a much more accepted principle nowadays but back then I felt I had to do a lot of justifying to get this principle build into the management paradigm.

So, that takes care of the latter half of the sentence but what about the first half?

Well, the argument goes that until you embrace the idea of flow through a value chain then you cannot understand where to focus management attention and investment dollars in order to maximize the investors’ return for those dollars. Hence, adopting a flow paradigm is fundamental to devising optimal investment strategies.

A flow model also reveals the primary role for the agile project manager - issue log management and resolution. By focusing on what is obstructing flow - issues arising - the project manager keeps things moving. The Scrum community will identify with this as the primary role of the Scrummaster. Ken Schwaber teaches quite clearly that he sees the management of the issue log, surfacing issues at daily scrums and running them down before they impact “burn down” as the primary mechanism for realizing results.

Astute readers who are fans of TOC will realize that this first bullet also encompasses and embraces the underlying principles of TOC and the Five Focusing Steps. Once you have a flow model, you can go look for bottlenecks in the flow. More DOI and TOC when I get to the third statement about uncertainty.