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Planview Customer Success Center

Scrum Master

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The Scrum Master's Guide to Flow Methodology

This comprehensive guide is designed to help you harness the power of Flow Methodology to take your team 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 Scrum Masters are saying:

  • When you understand what the graphs and the data are saying, your problems start looking you right in the face and waving!

  • So much meat and aha insights!

  • This is a great tool to monitor where we are lagging and provide ideas for improvement for the team.

 

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

  • Enabling a high-performing empowered, self-managing, self-organizing team 

  • Encouraging continuous improvement by learning via experiments 

  • Increasing focus on the effort essential to improving business outcomes

  • Making economic and data-based decisions on observed data rather than assumptions

  • Creating a good working environment with engaged team members that are aligned with stakeholders on a common goal

Accelerate your Professional Growth

  • Demonstrating leadership and problem-solving skills 

  • Developing a business and outcome-oriented mindset 

  • Growing your influence on decision-making with powerful Lean-Agile metrics and insights

 

Recommended Practices

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

Cadence Practice
Daily

  • Detect bottlenecks to determine where current work is either flowing smoothly or accumulating and experiencing delays.

  • Identify work that may have become outdated.

  • Discuss and identify any actions that can be taken to expedite the completion of neglected work.
Bi-Weekly

  • Conduct a comprehensive review of metrics, trends, insights, and business results. Identify areas of success and opportunities for improvement, using Neglected WIP insights and the bottleneck finder to see how it’s manifesting in the data.

  • Adopt an empirical approach by creating actionable improvement items in the backlog for the upcoming sprint, tagging them as debt.

  • Add timeline events to denote experiments and other meaningful changes and monitor their impact on value delivery.

  • Administer a quick team happiness survey and log the results as a happiness Business Result.
Monthly

  • Conduct a monthly review of the Flow Metrics dashboard.

  • Ensure that the product goals are accurately reflected and aligned with the value stream business results.

  • Update and review the current month’s Business Results, and discuss ways in which flow should be adjusted to achieve desired targets.

  • Reevaluate and prioritize backlog items accordingly. 

  • Establish Flow Distribution® targets for the upcoming month.

  • Discuss ongoing experiments to improve outcomes.
Quarterly

  • Select and prioritize work that will contribute to the desired business results and turn into an increment of value.

  • Identify potential bottlenecks to prioritize and tackle during the next sprint.

 

Best Viz Features for your Role

  • Flow Time

    Use Flow Time to improve predictability

    Replace intuition with historical data and trends and make more accurate commitments.

    Learn more
  • Flow Velocity

    Improve agility with Flow Velocity®

    Help teams focus on faster value delivery and shorter feedback loops.

    Learn more
  • Flow Load

    Use Flow Load® to monitor team health

    Keep workloads under control and prevent cognitive overload with a proper pull mechanism.

    Learn more
  • Flow Distribution

    Make all work visible with Flow Distribution®

    Protect the long-term health of the team and the product through appropriate distribution.

    Learn more
  • Bottleneck Finder

    Prevent distractions with the Bottleneck Finder

    Remove efficiencies from your processes by tackling constraints.

    Learn more
  • Business Results

    Track Business Results to maximize effectiveness

    Focus on the positive impacts the team’s creating for customers (internal & external).

    Learn more
  • Neglected WIP Insights

    Use Neglected WIP Insights to course-correct

    Identify when work is aging rapidly and severely.

    Learn more
  • Timeline Events

    Optimize the work environment with Timeline Events

    Create a culture of experimentation by tracking the impact of improvement efforts on metrics timelines.

    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 a Scrum Master, 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 a Scrum Master, 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 a Scrum Master, you'll want to focus on these Flow Templates: