All too often, as you are just getting started with evaluating your flow metrics, you find that the data you have collected is entirely unreliable. As a result, it is impossible to use that data to make data-driven decisions. Most…

Every business strives to realize more revenue with less cash burn while continuing to delight their customers. Often though, the main sources of inefficiencies preventing business success are invisible. You need to turn on the light and reveal the current…

Story sizing into even pieces is a widely-spread activity, often considered to be a prerequisite to making reliable future predictions. The concept of artificially splitting your work items into even pieces to be able to produce an accurate delivery forecast…

How do you know which work item to start next? If you’re a Scrum practitioner you would probably sit down twice a month and arrange the top x number of items so your team knows what to work on. Usually,…

The typical narrative surrounding growing businesses is that, when the demand starts rising, they find they are struggling to cope. With a tremendous amount of customer requests constantly coming your way, you would probably assume that with the growth of…

Businesses across the globe fail to deliver on time. In the early days of prison warfare, a deadline meant a line that was drawn around a prison to deter prisoners from crossing. If they did, they’d be shot dead on…

What does it mean to maintain a stable system, and, moreover, why does this actually matter? The short answer is that stable systems translate into predictable systems. Predictable systems enable you to give a confident answer to the quite common…

One of the most efficient ways to achieve a robust and highly productive business operation is to pay close attention to the bottlenecks in your system and manage them effectively. In his book ‘Theory of Constraints’, Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt defines…

The modern workforce is rapidly swapping the security of an office-based, nine-to-five job with the flexibility of freelancing. In fact, figures from Forbes suggest 59% of U.S. companies now use a flexible workforce to some degree, with new tactics to…