Over the past few years, the concept of “Flow” has become more and more popular in Critical Chain circles. The basic concept is easy: value “flows” from an organization in the form of completed projects or revenue. The greater the flow, the better you’re doing; the more flow is interrupted, the more there are delays, the more you have opportunities for improvement.
Interruptions to Flow
It’s important to understand interruptions to flow, because that’s an area where you can have a lot of impact. When projects sit around or move slowly, they flow more slowly. The organization suffers. There are several types of interruptions, for example:
- Too much work in process: If you have too much to do—too many projects, too many tasks—there’s a big temptation to multitask. That wastes time and resources.
- Due dates: dates may push people to work harder, but they also make it hard to be early. In my experience, they serve to slow things down far more often than they speed things up.
- Lack of feedback: when obstacles arise, when things sit around, feedback allows you to keep things moving.
- Lack of progress on key tasks: if people aren’t making progress on Critical Chain tasks, flow suffers, even if everyone is working hard.
- Lack of key resources: sometimes organizations are resource constrained. I hesitate to bring this up, because while everyone complains about lack of resources, it’s hard to tell what really makes sense until other interruptions to flow are addressed.
Improving Flow
Here are a couple of things you should consider to reduce interruptions to flow:
- Prioritize, Focus, and Finish. Focus on what’s most important until it’s done. To promote it:
- Have everyone flag a task in Fusion Online as their “focus” task. If an important task isn’t in a project schedule, put it in a checklist or create a non-project task. Expect progress on the “focus” tasks, especially if they are on the Critical Chain.
- Hold daily project team standup meetings, no more than ten minutes long, in which the team members talk about the status of the Critical Chain or near-Critical Chain tasks and what can be done to help move them along.
- Limit the amount of work people have in front of them. This can be a tough one: individuals want more work, so they look more valuable; and nobody wants their projects stopped. But reducing the amount of work in process improves flow and reduces chaos and multitasking. The most powerful way to do that is to reduce the number of active projects. It’s hard, but there are also huge potential benefits; this simulation helps explain why. Here are a few techniques that can help cut down on number of projects:
- “Freeze” or stop work on some low-priority projects.
- Prioritize all your projects, from 1 to N, publish that information, and tell people to focus on tasks in the highest priority projects.
- Pace or “stagger” your projects based on project priorities and resource load versus capacity. This requires some scheduling information, but not necessarily a lot; some approximate pacing is better than none. Fusion Pipeline can help.
An alternative to reducing the number of active projects (item 2) is to get a lot better at prioritize, focus, and finish (item 1).
Evaluating Flow
To see the value of flow, let’s compare two worlds. First is a project world in which everyone knows and focuses on global project priorities. Some characteristics of this “Flow World”:
- Highest priority projects get first call on resources.
- Critical tasks are given extra focus.
- Multitasking only happens when there is a good reason.
- The highest priority work and projects are finished as quickly as possible.
- People are constantly looking for ways to improve the flow of work.
This is the world we aim for with Critical Chain.
Now imagine the opposite extreme, in which projects and tasks are without “ordinal” priorities; that is, no one can say “this one thing is highest priority for us.” In one common scenario, people put dates on everything. Every date is a commitment, and therefore safety time is baked into every date. Lateness is uncommon and earliness is unheard of. In another scenario, people have no credible project priorities or project schedules. Either way, multitasking and slow projects are the norm. People spread their time across several projects, adding to the slowness and multitasking. Let’s call this the “Bumpy World,” because dates and lack of data create a lot of bumps on the road to getting projects out the door.
At ProChain, we talk all the time about the advantages of the Flow World: faster projects, better quality, less stress. There are also disadvantages, mainly in terms of the emotional and financial costs of switching worlds. How do you decide whether to move from wherever you are on this spectrum towards better flow?
You’ll need to understand the costs and benefits of changing. Many of us understand the potential of the Flow World and its immense value. We’re tempted to stop our evaluations there. But often “immense value” isn’t clear enough to outweigh the perceived costs.
One approach is to look at what’s happened with others who have taken that journey. There are plenty of Critical Chain success stories around. Our clients have presented numerous case studies at our conferences. From these examples, you can get some idea of the benefits and challenges.
We also often recommend pilots, whose objective is to give you a sense of the size of the opportunity and how hard the journey will be. You’ll get a lot of qualitative data; quantitative data will be more difficult. In our pilots, we look at the impact of better decisions on speed, but that barely scratches the surface of what’s possible.
To get a quick and dirty estimate of how much faster the Flow World could be, you can look at the amount of multitasking going on in your world. As a very simple example, if everyone has on average three projects whose tasks they are actively working, your projects would—on average, approximately—take three times as long as Flow World projects. This is a very gross estimate, but it’s a start.
To get a better estimate of your potential for more speed, you can build schedule templates. Categorize your projects into similar types (products, duration, complexity) and build “ideal” schedules to see what’s possible. You might want to include three duration estimates: the actual “touch time” that activities might take in the Flow World, realistic “stretch” or “focus” durations for today’s environment, and realistic “safe” or “low-risk” durations. This will require getting experts together to construct dependency networks and figure out durations. Comparing these templates to current results should give you an idea of your potential for speed. You can also use them to simulate a portfolio of projects. Of course, you’ll also be able to use them to dramatically speed up the scheduling process.
Finally, on a historical note, I want to give a shout-out to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934-2021). He was the Hungarian psychologist who pioneered the concept of “flow.” For him, “flow” meant the psychological state of optimal performance; you might think of “project flow” as the team state of optimal project performance.
