Four common software delivery bottlenecks

Dominica DeGrandis: Hi, I'm principal Flow advisor Dominica DeGrandis and in this tutorial i'm joined by VSM practice lead Carmen DeArdo to talk about how to identify common software delivery bottlenecks in Tasktop Viz.

Carmen DeArdo: Thanks Dominica i'm excited to talk about this. Finding bottlenecks is one of my favorite topics.

Degrandis: Mine too — in this tutorial we're going to talk about the importance of finding your bottlenecks, identifying and addressing four common bottlenecks, choosing the right bottleneck to address first, and then the importance of experimentation around bottlenecks. So when it comes to finding your bottlenecks, when you start using Tasktop Viz you gain visibility into the activities that flow across your value stream. And one of the things that you can start to see is after a period of baselining your data is just how fast you are delivering value as captured by Flow Time for each one of your flow work items. So that'd be Features, Defects, Risks and Depth. And one of the main goals with value streams is to achieve faster, more predictable workflows so you can meet the needs of your business that you identified for your product.

Finding your bottleneck, the part of the end-to-end workflow where work gets stuck, is kind of like having this helicopter view up above the highway where cars begin to back up. Because you're up high you have this big picture view — you can see where things are slowing down. You can start to make, you know, evidence-based decisions and changes to overcome the issue and see tangible measurable improvements in your flow time. And as a result, in your flow velocity, often value stream team members they intuitively understand where the issues are, but they lack the objective data to make this these evidence based changes for improvement. 

So Tasktop Viz can validate those suspicions with data and metrics, give you the evidence that allows you to open the door to this new understanding where you can address some of thecognitive biases that may be floating around in your organization And this data helpsnprovide the basis for experimentation and future investment.

DeArdo: The important thing to understand about bottlenecks is that you likely have a few places where work slows down. So the trick is to identify which one is the system's bottleneck — the one that that is worth tackling first. We'll talk about that towards the end of this tutorial. Your bottlenecks can appear anywhere in the flow work, from ideation to production. And today we're going to show you how to find them. We'll talk you through four common bottlenecks: what they are, how to see them in Viz and how to address them. The common bottlenecks are resource or expertise scarcity, lack of automation, process timings and dependencies.

DeGrandis: All right, so let's dive into the first one, Carmen: resource or expertise scarcity.