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Planview Customer Success Center

Agile Coach

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The Agile Coach's Guide to Flow Methodology

This comprehensive guide is designed to help you harness the power of Flow Methodology to take your coaching to the next level. 

In the following sections and pages, you'll learn how to leverage Flow Methodology, in tandem with Planview Viz and Planview Hub, to maximize your impact and drive transformative change within your organization.

Here is what Agile Coaches are saying:

  • For the first time we are meeting our stakeholders to discuss what is important and how we can measure it.

  • This data provides a way to empower teams to be able to bring their impediments to light and leaders and management will be called on to help remove them.

  • For the first time we are being proactive, planning, visualizing and discussing.

What is Flow Methodology?

Planview's Flow Methodology is a powerful set of practices designed to optimize value streams and achieve optimal flow. This comprehensive set of practices seamlessly integrates with your existing ways of working, eliminating the need to overhaul your entire framework. 

By adopting this methodology, you will not only optimize your value streams but also equip yourself with the skills to excel as a leader and accelerate your professional growth.

Elevate your Leadership

  • Highlight your teams success by demonstrating measurable improvements in business agility and impact
  • Adopt a common set of framework-agnostic metrics that maximize value regardless of tools, methodologies, and maturity
  • Empower your teams to drive incremental change
  • Realize the fruits of agility at an enterprise level
  • Implement a data-driven strategy that acknowledges and balances the tradeoffs between speed, value, cost, quality, and engagement

Accelerate your Professional Growth

  • Gain practical value stream management experience
  • Refine your business acumen and outcome-oriented approach to enhance your interactions with leadership and drive effective cultural change
  • Base your coaching on robust data insights, quantifying the impact of your coaching and demonstrating your value as a leader

Recommended Practices

Explore the table below to uncover recommended practices tailored to your role.

Cadence Practice
Daily

  • Examine work in a "Blocked" state to identify bottlenecks and facilitate their progress.

  • Assess aging work to determine if it should be canceled, deprioritized, or if additional resources are required to expedite its completion.
Weekly

  • Review work in a "Blocked" state that is dependent on external teams. Ensure cross-team collaboration and prioritization to address these dependencies. 
Bi-Weekly

  • Review Flow Metrics, insights, bottlenecks and business results. 

  • Discuss whether you’d made the right tradeoffs as represented in Flow Distribution®. 

  • Choose improvements to target during the next increment. 
Monthly

  • Support a cadence of consistently setting and reviewing Business Results.

  • Collaborate with leadership teams and managers to ensure a comprehensive understanding of the data and metrics. Prepare them to effectively present and discuss the information during operational reviews, such as portfolio sync meetings or LACE (Leadership, Alignment, Collaboration, and Execution) meetings.
Quarterly

  • Prepare data needed for a retro before a new planning period. What is current capacity, what are realistic commitments?

  • Reflect and discuss inputs to planning, for example bottlenecks, load, and distribution targets. 

  • Review previous quarter’s metrics and business results. 

  • Harvest success stories, share them with your team, leadership and peers. Apply learnings more broadly. 

  • Establish priorities for the upcoming quarter and set Flow Metrics targets accordingly.
Ad-Hoc

  • Coach teams on analyzing and interpreting their Flow Metrics.

  • Come with targeted questions based to prompt richer conversations. 

  • Discuss new issues and mitigation options. 

  • Review progress towards goals.

 

Best Viz Features for your Role

  • Flow Metrics

    Set the stage for a successful transformation

    Use Flow Metrics to determine if flow is sufficient to support identified business outcomes and leverage data-driven insights to focus on necessary adjustments to achieve targets.

    Learn more
  • Flow Time and Flow Velocity

    Use Flow Time and Flow Velocity® to improve agility

    Measure the results of the Agile transformation in faster market response times and an increased rate of business value delivery.

    Learn more
  • Flow Efficiency

    Optimize the work environment with Flow Efficiency®

    Use data to give voice to valid complaints that are not heeded; Shape data-driven cases to relieve pain points and frustrations.

    Learn more
  • Flow Distribution

    Use Flow Distribution® to balance work intake

    Coach stakeholders on the importance of all four types of work. Help the business understand debt and risk. Mentor on the right distribution based on product maturity.

    Learn more
  • Timeline Events

    Celebrate wins with Timeline Events

    Ensure success stories are visible on dashboards by decorating metrics; Share successes broadly to boost motivation and positivity.

    Learn more
  • Business Results

    Connect Technology & Business with Results Tracking

    Mentor the team through their data and empower them to make decisions that can improve their daily work. Teach how to make joint and intentional tradeoffs when prioritizing one business result over another.

    Learn more
  • Portfolio Insights

    Focus your attention with Portfolio Insights

    Look at portfolios and lines of business to leverage success stories and focus attention on those who need the most help.

    Learn more

 

Next Steps

To assist you in this journey, we have curated the next steps you should take to highlight the most relevant sections of our Flow Methodology.

Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5

Visit the Understanding Value Stream Management page and gain a foundational knowledge on the principles and concepts behind value stream management.

Learn how to assess the current state of your organization's Flow Maturity and identify areas for improvement.

Discover effective Flow Optimizations to resolve prevalent issues within your value stream.

As an Agile Coach, you'll want to focus on these Flow Optimizations:

Explore Flow Techniques designed to enhance the efficient delivery of business value and optimize the achievement of desired outcomes.

As an Agile Coach you'll want to focus on these Flow Techniques:

Utilize pre-designed Flow Templates that provide guidance and support as you implement Planview's Flow Methodology within your organization.

As an Agile Coach, you'll want to focus on these Flow Templates: