The Pursuit of Relevance

eGUIDE

SPOTLIGHT

· As businesses shift to organising by value

stream, optimising for flow of value has become the new imperative

· Spotlight is a suite of three services

designed to help you measure and optimise flow

· By shining a light on key bottlenecks

in your system, you’re now in a position to align leaders and teams on actions to alleviate them

· As you begin to clear blockages, you’ll

develop new ways of thinking, being and working that unlock value across your entire portfolio of work

How slow is your flow?

Every leader and team experiences frustration when they struggle to get value into customers’ hands. It’s why Value Stream Management focused on flow of customer value has become the most important lens through which businesses consider delivery performance.

Many businesses which have started their value-focused journeys find it challenging to measure flow. In our experience, this is because of the metrics they use. They:

  • Only provide visibility of progress of software initiatives,
  • Only provide visibility of progress of software initiatives, but not the system as a whole. They don’t identify the systemic constraints affecting the value stream
  • Don’t show the actual flow of customer value
  • Don’t show the actual flow of customer value

HYPR’s Flow Optimisation suite comprises three services that will help your teams accelerate flow:

  • Are used solely by technology teams but aren’t readily understood by the wider business. This severely hampers alignment on actions between tech and business leaders

Flow Illuminator

Establishes Flow and DORA metrics to measure the current flow of value through your system and identify bottlenecks

Flow Essentials

An interactive workshop that equips executives and teams with the knowledge and mindset to embrace Flow Principles

Flow Consulting

Expert guidance in organising around value streams to put metrics and principles into action. We consider the human and operational aspects of flow optimisation in your context

Optimise flow. Achieve this...

Measuring flow accurately, understanding Flow Principles and aligning on appropriate actions is critical to optimisation efforts. When you get it right, the outcomes are transformative.

On the following pages, we provide more detail on the three Spotlight services that aim to help you achieve these results.

  1. Lower defect rates

1. Flow Illuminator

Establish baseline metrics

Our flagship product, Flow Illuminator, integrates seamlessly with your existing work management tools to establish a starting point for achieving optimal flow. It’s built to give you Flow and DORA metrics that show you where flow is at now and your progress towards these goals:

  • Delivering the highest customer value
  • In the fastest possible time
  • Understanding the economic impact of investing in improvements

Data. Dashboards. Direction

  • With the right types of work
  • And with minimal delays
  • Flow Illuminator automatically collects Flow and DORA data and presents it in user-friendly dashboards
  • The metrics allow you to visualise flow, the distribution of work types, code quality and more
  • You’ll see the bottlenecks and dependencies that are really holding you back in your value delivery process
  • The data is presented in a language and business-context that’s readily understandable by every stakeholder. It connects IT with the wider business
  • You see your system as a whole, in one place. Flow can be tracked alongside outcomes from Finance, Ops, CX, OKRs and HR
  • You have the critical information you need to present better business cases and align leaders and teams around investment decisions – from value to outcome

Identifying bottlenecks and accelerating time to market

Flow Illuminator helps you see across the system. It identifies:

  • Where work is piling up
  • Where effort should be focused to make the biggest difference
  • When quality is deteriorating and why
  • Where dependencies are slowing delivery
  • The results of experiments

With Flow Illuminator, you’re no longer at risk of optimising flow anywhere outside the system – which can be sub-optimal and even counter-productive. You’ll have much greater confidence about the work that needs to be done and be able to make more informed trade-off decisions around capacity. And you’ll be able to create a better balance between innovation and sustaining investments.

Pricing

$25k (AU$)

The confidence to make improvements that work

Flow Illuminator for up to three teams (plus a fixed fee for set up and tool integration)

$3-5k (AU$)

For each extra team depending on data quality and technical environment

The Flow Illuminator engagement takes between two-to-four weeks for three teams.

To get a comprehensive understanding of broader constraints at the system level, consider engaging our Floodlight service.

Identifying system level constraints

Spotlight’s Flow Illuminator service measures how fast value is flowing through your system at the value stream level.

2. Flow Essentials

Learn the principles of flow

  • How to prioritise resources between technical improvements, feature delivery, risks and quality
  • How to use metrics to make experiments in delivery
  • How metrics enable informed, organisation-wide, data-based decisions to accelerate flow of customer value
  • Why managing Flow and DORA is critical to any modern digital business

Learning outcomes

  • What a contemporary value stream looks like
  • How to measure the value delivered to customers through a value stream
  • Understanding the different types of work in a value stream
  • How to identify the bottlenecks preventing flow
  • How to prioritise resources between technical improvements, feature delivery, risks and quality
  • How to use metrics to make experiments in delivery
  • How metrics enable informed, organisation-wide, data-based decisions to accelerate flow of customer value
  • Why managing Flow and DORA is critical to any modern digital business

Topics covered

  • Defining Value Stream Management and flow
  • The Principles of Flow
  • The impacts on flow
  • The Flow Framework®
  • Flow Metrics
  • Interpreting Flow and DORA Metrics
  • How to know you're making the right improvements in your processes
  • DORA metrics
  • Using the metrics to make more reliable estimates on delivery to your customers

Workshop essentials

  • Audience: Aimed at CIOs, CTOs, CDOs, portfolio managers, product owners, delivery leads and engineers
  • Attendees: 20-100
  • Duration: 1-day
  • Location: At your place or we can arrange a great off-site venue and organise the catering

Pricing

$5-10k (AU$) depending on number of attendees plus expenses

3. Flow Consulting

By your side. In your context

Flow Consulting provides you with expert HYPR flow consultants to work with you side-by-side on your Value Stream Management journey. Their guidance is always geared to your needs and optimising flow in your context.

How can we guide you?

Organising for optimal flow

We can help you:

  • Build a world-class, value-driven, product engineering practice
  • Properly organise around value streams
  • Address the human and operational aspects of flow optimisation – creating appropriate team topologies for your value streams

Learn to see

A HYPR flow consultant will always be responsible for your Flow Illuminator engagement to establish Flow and DORA metrics (their cost is included in the price of the Flow Illuminator engagement). Beyond Flow Illuminator, we can then:

  • Provide hands-on help to improve the current state of your data. This may be necessary if Flow Illuminator identifies data anomalies from your existing tools (eg. JIRA or ADO) that need correcting. We can help you build further proof of concepts to show data improvements
  • Advise where necessary and appropriate on the early implementation of dedicated Value Stream Management tools and platforms such as Planview@ Tasktop Viz
  • Help you gain a deeper understanding of what the data means in your context

Learn to improve

  • We can help you use metrics to:
  • Find a pathway to resolve systemic issues
  • Clear specific bottlenecks to flow. For example, if deployment is taking up 70% of the Flow Time metric, what action should we take? We can help you build experiments to find out

HYPR – a leading Value Stream Management and Flow practice

  • Align leaders and teams across the improvements you need to make first

HYPR was among the first consulting practices in Australia and New Zealand to invest in building a comprehensive Value Stream Management practice. Our highly-qualified Flow Consultants have helped enterprises make the shift successfully. We can help you too…

Learn to scale

We can help you scale flow practices across more teams / value streams.

Flow Consulting is a bespoke service based on your needs and the size and complexity of your value stream/s.

Engagement Model

Build your world-class product engineering practice. Optimise the flow of customer value and build the adaptability required for business model innovation

ALIGN

We seek to understand your vision, objectives and desired outcomes. We explore the constraints you face and a timescale for transforming your delivery system

DIVERSIFY

Using the Delivery Ecosystem, the teams are able to explore more adjacent or radical pools of value

EMBED ECOSYSTEM

We bring more teams into the Delivery Ecosystem, uplifting capability across your product engineering practice

A comprehensive assessment of the maturity of your product engineering practice at the system level. Delivers critical insights on constraints to flow and helps align stakeholders about the improvements you need to make

Measures the current flow of value through your system. Compares your performance against industry-recognised benchmarks. Provides expert guidance on how best to optimise flow

CREATE ECOSYSTEM

We adapt proven patterns in your context to create a flow-optimised, human and technical ecosystem that can deliver slices of value fast www.hyprinnovation.io