When we start thinking about ways to line up all of the essential steps needed to get a job done into a steady, continuous flow, it changes everything.
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&#; James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones, Lean Thinking
Note: About the Flow Article Series
SAFe is a flow-based system. As such, any interruptions to flow must be identified and addressed systematically to enable continuous value delivery. While flow-based guidance is embedded throughout SAFe, a special collection of eight articles directly addresses impediments to flow. These are Value Stream Management, Principle #6- Make value flow without interruptions, Team Flow, ART Flow, Solution Train Flow, Portfolio Flow, the extended Guidance articles Accelerating Flow with SAFe, and Coaching Flow.
Enterprises must respond quickly to market changes to remain competitive in the digital age. Delivering a continuous flow of value to customers in the &#;shortest sustainable lead time&#; is the central theme of SAFe. Doing so requires moving new system features through the development value stream as quickly as possible. Achieving continuous flow requires a new way of working that eliminates the traditional start-stop-start project cycle and the waterfall phase gates that hinder flow.
The principles and practices that enable the uninterrupted flow of value in SAFe are integral to the Lean-Agile Mindset, Value Stream Management, and Lean Thinking [1], which can be summarized as:
This article, SAFe Principle 6, describes how to make value flow without interruptions by introducing &#;eighth flow accelerators&#; that can be used to improve flow at any level of SAFe.
First, it&#;s essential to understand what SAFe means by flow. Flow occurs when there is a smooth, linear, and fast movement of work product from step to step in a relevant value stream. While the details of any flow system are based on its context, all flow systems have eight common properties, as illustrated in Figure 1.
Each is described briefly below:
Each flow property is subject to optimizations, and often many steps encounter unnecessary delays, bottlenecks, and other impediments to flow. Making value flow without interruptions can best be achieved by adopting the eight &#;flow accelerators&#; described in this article. These powerful accelerators of value are relevant to all Framework levels, but the challenges differ for each. An individual SAFe article discusses how these accelerators apply to each flow domain: Team Flow, ART Flow, Solution Train Flow, and Portfolio Flow.
Overloading teams and ARTs with more work than can be reasonably accomplished is a common and pernicious problem. Too much work in process (WIP) confuses priorities, causes frequent context switching, and increases overhead. It overloads people, scatters focus on immediate tasks, reduces productivity and throughput, and increases wait times for new functionality. Like a highway at rush hour, there is simply no upside to having more work in a system than the system can handle.
The first corrective action is to make the current WIP visible to all stakeholders. Figure 2 shows a simple Kanban board that illustrates the total amount of WIP and the process state of each work item. This Kanban serves as an initial process diagnostic, showing the current bottlenecks. Often, simply visualizing the current volume of work is the wake-up call that causes the organization to address the systemic problems of too much work and too little flow.
The following action is balancing the amount of WIP against the available development capacity. This is done by establishing&#;and continually adjusting&#;WIP limits for the relevant states. No new work is started when any workflow state reaches its WIP limit. This matches demand to capacity and increases flow through the system.
Limiting WIP, however, requires knowledge, discipline, and commitment. It may even seem counterintuitive to those who believe that the more work you put into the system, the more you get out. That can be true up to a point, but when the system becomes overloaded, throughput decreases dramatically. Indeed, there is no substitute for effectively managing WIP.
Bottlenecks occur wherever people or resources (systems, materials, and so on) in the flow of value experience demand greater than the available capacity. Examples include a shortage of a specialized skill (such as a data scientist), insufficient processing power for the build servers in the CI/CD pipeline, or a silicon supply shortage for building the integrated circuits of a cyber-physical system. Work piles up at a bottleneck and limits the effective throughput of value, as Figure 3 illustrates.
Upstream processes are blocked from moving value. Downstream processes are starved and waiting. Bottlenecks cause the value stream to operate slowly and uneconomically, far below its potential capacity. This is emphasized in the Theory of Constraints (Goldratt [2], [3]), which posits that the throughput of any flow system is limited by the capacity of a dominant constraint, or bottleneck. By this theory, investment in optimizing the system at any other point than the dominant constraint is waste, as it will not improve the throughput of the system.
No matter the theory, bottlenecks must be addressed, by adding additional skills, people, or other resources at the bottleneck step. While that is not always easy to do, (there are reasons why the bottleneck is a bottleneck), eliminating dominant bottlenecks must be a primary focus as throughput will not increase until the bottleneck is addressed.
In the meantime, however, the complex workflows in solution development provide other options. It&#;s often the case that not all the work is single-threaded (must pass through the bottleneck step). There is often other work (different features, etc.) that does not have to pass through the bottleneck. In this case, teams can selectively pick and deliver other valuable work, thus increasing value throughput, while the dominant bottleneck is being addressed. In addition, relentless improvement drives us to improve wherever we can do so, and knowledge workers take pride in improving the processes that are under their control. In the end, the efficiency of every step matters.
But the fact is that bottlenecks limit throughput and negatively affect economic outcomes.
Handoffs occur whenever there is a separation between knowledge, responsibility, action, and feedback [4]. For example, dependencies happen between teams when the work of one team cannot continue until related work by another team is completed (see Figure 4). Both result in development waste in the form of wait states in the flow of value. They can also lead to rework as the knowledge transfer is likely imperfect, causing further delays.
The best solution to overcome handoffs and dependencies is to create teams and ARTs with all the knowledge, resources, skills, and decision-making authority to create an end-to-end flow of value. However, unhealthy dependencies and handoffs can still occur even when teams and trains have all the skills to deliver end-to-end value. This can happen when there is a series of handoffs between Agile Team members or when there are delays while waiting on decisions to be made outside the ART. Activities like value stream mapping, retros, and the I&A problem-solving workshop can help identify the root causes and potential solutions.
Learning is the foundation of improvement and the engine that powers product development [4]. Doing this as fast as possible speeds up and improves the overall development process. The goal is to get positive and negative feedback into the development process as early as possible.
However, we often discover that getting early feedback can be difficult for a variety of reasons, for example:
Fast feedback is generally achieved by applying the basic Plan-Do-Check-Adjust (PDCA) learning cycle. However, to accelerate flow further, we&#;ve found that more needs to be done, for example:
Generally, solution builders need two types of feedback from each PDCA cycle (Figure 5):
Creating the mechanisms and processes to collect a wide range of data is the critical first step to promoting flow with faster feedback, but it doesn&#;t stop there. The information should be quickly analyzed and evaluated to make effective adjustments and initiate the next PDCA cycle based on these learnings.
Faster feedback is one of the primary reasons for working in smaller batches. The smaller the size, the faster teams can collect and evaluate the feedback to adjust. In addition, smaller batches reduce WIP by limiting the number of requirements, designs, code, tests, and other work items moving through the system at any point. Smaller batches go through the system faster and with less variability, fostering faster learning. Moreover, since each item in the batch has some variability, larger batches accumulate more variability.
The economically optimal batch size depends on the holding cost (the cost for delayed feedback, inventory decay, delayed value delivery, and so on) and the transaction cost (the cost of preparing and implementing the batch). Figure 6 illustrates the tradeoff u-curve optimization for batch size [5].
To improve the economics of processing smaller batches&#; teams should focus on reducing the transaction costs&#;resulting in higher throughput for a batch of a given size. Reducing batch size typically involves investment in automating the Continuous Delivery Pipeline, including infrastructure and automation, continuous integration, builds, regression testing, and more. Shorter iterations and PIs also help to reduce batch size.
Reducing the length of the queue that is feeding the system is another critical way to accelerate flow. As we have all experienced, long queues are fundamentally bad. They introduce waste, delays, and information decay. In addition, Little&#;s Law (Figure 7) informs us that the average wait time equals the average queue length divided by the average processing rate. (While this might sound complicated, even the line at Starbucks illustrates that.) Therefore, assuming any average processing rate, the longer the queue, the longer the wait.
For solution development, the longer the queue of committed work awaiting implementation, the longer the wait time for new features, regardless of the team&#;s efficiency. For example, suppose an ART has an average flow velocity of 10 features per quarter and a committed backlog of 30. In that case, the customer may have to wait as long as three quarters before any new features can start developing. This example explains why queues are fundamentally bad and can significantly delay the ability to respond to customer needs.
Reducing queue length decreases delays, reduces waste, increases flow, and improves predictability. It&#;s a requisite for faster service and a more consistent flow of value.
Being &#;in the zone&#; (also described as being in a &#;flow state&#;) is an engaged mental state of extreme focus on an activity where the work feels effortless and time passes quickly. People and teams in the zone demonstrate higher creativity, productivity, happiness, and fulfillment. Getting into this mental state requires uninterrupted focus time, autonomy, competence, and connectedness to others to engender self-actualization and intrinsic motivation. [5]
Contrast this to the conditions in a typical work environment where work occurs in functional siloes in a batch-queue-handoff system. These frequent interruptions (emergency requests, ad hoc status reports, constant communication alerts, and so on) are the norm, and excessive WIP drives frequent task switching. (Figure 8).
There is an essential connection between creating a continuous flow of value and creating a working environment where individuals and teams can maximize their time in the zone. Knowledge workers also need the time and space free from interruption essential for complex tasks involving application, analysis, evaluation, and creativity, and ultimately the personal satisfaction that completion engenders.
During or after a Lean-Agile transformation, enterprises must constantly look out for legacy policies and practices that inhibit flow (Figure 9). Many of these practices became part of the culture and are described as &#;we&#;ve always done it this way,&#; even when they are no longer fit for purpose. Examples are many, some legendary:
And that&#;s not an exhaustive list. While many of these patterns may well have solved problems in the past, they now create new problems that become ongoing impediments to flow. They must be proactively or reactively discovered, eliminated, modified, or mitigated.
It&#;s difficult to improve what isn&#;t measured. And historically, it has been challenging to measure the development process as the work items are mostly intangible and invisible, living mainly in the minds of the knowledge workers who design and build the systems. But the physics and tooling of flow (timeboxes, Kanban, value stream mapping, CD pipeline, stories, features, and more) provide a new basis for measuring the flow of value through the development value stream. The SAFe Measure and Grow article describes six metrics &#;flow distribution, velocity, time, load, efficiency, and predictability&#;for measuring flow (see Figure 10).
Together, these metrics provide a comprehensive view as new value flows through the development value stream. These measures need to be relatively easy to collect, maintain, and visible to be valuable and actionable. Fortunately, they can be automated using most modern Agile Lifecycle Management (ALM) tooling. In addition, organizations should complement the flow metrics with qualitative data to ensure their delivery flow creates the right solutions for customers when needed.
These eight flow accelerators help teams increase throughput and deliver value faster. As an added benefit, implementing them gives people a sense of control over the process and triggers fast and measurable improvements in customer satisfaction and employee engagement.
[1] Womack, James P., and Jones, Daniel T. Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Organization. Free Press, . [2] Goldratt, Eliyahu M. The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement. The North River Press Publishing Corporation, [3] Goldratt, E. M. What is this Thing called Theory of Constraints and How should it be Implemented? North River Press, Inc, [4] Oosterwal, Dantar P. The Lean Machine. AMACOM, [5] Reinertsen, Donald G. The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development. Celeritas, . [6] Ward, Allen, and Durward Sobeck. Lean Product and Process Development. Lean Enterprise Institute, . [7] Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow. HarperCollins, [8] Kersten, Mik. Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework. IT Revolution Press, .
Last update: 6 February
You can help ensure that people enter data consistently and follow the same steps every time they work with a customer by creating a business process flow. For example, you might want to create a business process flow to have everyone handle customer service requests the same way, or to require that people get approval for an invoice before submitting an order. Business process flows use the same underlying technology as other processes, but the capabilities that they provide are very different from other features that use processes. To learn how to create or edit a business process flow, go to Create a business process flow.
Watch a short video about business process flows.
Business process flows provide a guide for people to get work done. They provide a streamlined user experience that leads people through the processes their organization has defined for interactions that need to be advanced to a conclusion of some kind. This user experience can be tailored so that people with different security roles can have an experience that best suits the work they do.
Use business process flows to define a set of steps for people to follow to take them to a desired outcome. These steps provide a visual indicator that tells people where they are in the business process. Business process flows reduce the need for training because new users don&#;t have to focus on which table they should be using. They can let the process guide them. You can configure business process flows to support common sales methodologies that can help your sales groups achieve better results. For service groups, business process flows can help new staff get up-to-speed more quickly and avoid mistakes that could result in unsatisfied customers.
With business process flows, you define a set of stages and steps that are then displayed in a control at the top of the form.
Each stage contains a group of steps. Each step represents a column where data can be entered. You can advance to the next stage by using the Next Stage button. In the unified interface, you can work with a business process flow stage inside the stage flyout or you can pin it to the side pane. Business process flows doesn't support expanding the stage flyout to the side pane on mobile devices.
You can make a step required so that people must enter data for a corresponding column before they can proceed to the next stage. This is commonly called &#;stage-gating&#;. If you are adding a business-required or system-required column to a business process flow stage, we recommend that you add this column to your form as well.
Business process flows appear relatively simple compared to other types of processes because they don't provide any conditional business logic or automation beyond providing the streamlined experience for data entry and controlling entry into stages. However, when you combine them with other processes and customizations, they can play an important role in saving people time, reducing training costs, and increasing user adoption.
Note
If any stage, including the current stage, has required columns (except hidden columns), you must fill in the columns on those stages before you save the form or move to a new stage. Disabled columns will still block stage navigation if they are empty and required.
Want more information on flow control gate? Feel free to contact us.
When you or your user enters data using business process flows, the data changes are also applied to form columns so that any automation provided by business rules or form scripts can be applied immediately. Steps can be added that set values for columns that are not present in the form and these columns will be added to the Xrm.Page object model used for form scripts. Any workflows that are initiated by changes to columns included in a business process flow will be applied when the data in the form is saved. If the automation is applied by a real-time workflow, the changes will be immediately visible to the user when the data in the form is refreshed after the row is saved.
Although the business process flow control in the form does not provide any direct client-side programmability, changes applied by business rules or form scripts are automatically applied to business process flow controls. If you hide a column in a form, that column will also be hidden in the business process flow control. If you set a value by using business rules or form scripts, that value will be set within the business process flow.
Concurrent business process flows let customizers configure multiple business processes and associate them with the same starting row. Users can switch between multiple business processes running concurrently, and resume their work at the stage in the process that they were on.
The following business process flows are included. To understand how business process flows work, review these system business process flows:
Lead to Opportunity Sales Process
Opportunity Sales Process
to Case Process
You can use a business process flow for a single table or span multiple tables. For example, you may have a process that begins with an opportunity, then continues to a quote, an order, and then an invoice, before finally returning to close the opportunity.
You can design business process flows that tie together the rows for up to five different tables into a single process so that people using the app can focus on the flow of their process rather than on which table they are working in. They can more easily navigate between related table rows.
Not every user in an organization may follow the same process and different conditions may require that a different process be applied. You can have up to 10 active business process flows per table to provide appropriate processes for different situations.
You can associate business process flows with security roles so that only people with those security roles can see or use them. You can also set the order of the business process flows so that you can control which business process flow will be set by default. This works in the same way that multiple forms for a table are defined.
When someone creates a new table row, the list of available active business process definition is filtered by the user&#;s security role. The first activated business process definition available for the user&#;s security role according to the process order list is the one applied by default. If more than one active business process definitions is available, users can load another from the Switch Process dialog. Whenever processes are switched, the one currently rendered goes to the background and is replaced by the selected one, but it maintains its state and can be switched back. Each row can have multiple process instances associated (each for a different business process flow definition, up to a total of 10). On form load, only one business process flow is rendered. When any user applies a different process, that process may only load by default for that particular user.
To make sure a business process is loaded by default for all user (behavior equivalent to &#;pinning&#; the process), a custom Client API script (web resource) can be added on form load that specifically loads an existing business process instance based on the business process definition ID.
You can define business process flows only for those tables that support them. You also need to be aware of the limits for the number of processes, stages, and steps that can be added.
You can call on-demand workflows from inside a business process flow. You can configure this from the new business process flow designer by dragging a workflow component to a process stage or to the Global Workflows section. For more information about using workflows in business process flows, see Blog: Business process flow automation in Dynamics 365.
When you include a workflow that you want to trigger on Stage Exit of a stage in your business process flow, and that stage is the last stage in the flow, the designer gives the impression that the workflow will be triggered when that stage is completed. However, the workflow won't be triggered because a stage transition does not take place. You won't receive a warning or error preventing you from including the workflow on the stage. When a user interacts with the business process flow, finishing or abandoning the process does not result in a stage transition, and therefore the workflow is not triggered. Consider the following examples:
You create a business process flow with two stages, S1 connects to S2, with a workflow on stage S2 and set the trigger to Stage Exit.
You create a business process flow with three stages, S1 connect to S2, then S2 branches to S3. You include a workflow on S2 and set the trigger to Stage Exit.
The workflow won't trigger in either case. To work around this issue, you can add a Global Workflow and add the workflow you want to trigger to it so that the workflow is triggered for the business process rather than a stage of the process. You can set the trigger for a Global workflow to Process Abandoned or Process Completed to cause the workflow to trigger when a user abandons or completes the business process.
All custom tables can use business process flows. The following standard tables can also use business process flows:
To enable a custom table for business process flows, select the Business process flows (columns will be created) check box in the table definition. Note that you can&#;t undo this action.
Note
If you navigate to the business process flow stage that contains the Social Activity table and choose the Next Stage button, you&#;ll see the Create option. When you choose Create, the Social Activity form loads. However, because Social Activity isn&#;t valid for Create from the app user interface, you won&#;t be able to save the form and you&#;ll see the error message: &#;Unexpected error.&#;
To ensure acceptable performance and the usability of the user interface, there are some limitations you need to be aware of when you plan to use business process flows:
There can be no more than 10 activated business process flow processes per table.
Each process can contain no more than 30 stages.
Multi-table processes can contain no more than five tables.
Introduced in the Dynamics 365 (online), version 9.0 update, business process flow tables can appear in the system so that table row data can be made available in grids, views, charts, and dashboards.
With business processes flows available as a table, you can now use advanced finds, views, charts, and dashboards sourced from business process flow data for a given table, such as a lead or opportunity. System administrators and customizers can create custom business process flow grids, views, charts, and dashboards similar to those created with any other table.
Business process flows, such as Lead To Opportunity Sales Process, appear as a customizable table in solution explorer.
To access a default business process flow view, open solution explorer, expand Tables > expand the process that you want, such as Lead To Opportunity Sales Process, select Views, and then select the view that you want.
Several default views are available that you can view as a chart, such as the Active Opportunity Sales Process view.
You can also interact with business process flow tables from a workflow. For example, you can create a workflow for the Business Process Flow table row to change the Active Stage when a column on the Opportunity table row is updated. For more information about how to do this, see Automate business process flow stages using workflows.
You can use business process flows offline if the following conditions are met:
Specifically, the three commands that are available for a business process flow when the Power Apps app is offline are:
Recent rows are visible in a lookup column in the unified interface. To prevent the most recently used items from showing up in the lookup, follow these steps:
Sign in to Power Apps.
To learn more about using the Power Apps interface, go to Get started with Power Apps.
Select the correct environment from the top right.
On the left navigation pane, select More > Tables.
Search for your table and select your business process flow table.
In the Data Expressions group, select Forms.
On the Forms screen, select Information.
Select your lookup data step from the Tree view, and then check Disable most recently used items.
Save and then publish.
Currently, you can&#;t create custom forms for tables based on a business process flow.
If a solution includes a business process flow table, the business process flow table must be manually added to the solution before you export it. Otherwise, the business process flow table won't be included in the solution package. To learn more, go to create and edit tables.
Adding the process table to a model-driven app may result in limited functionality. To learn more, go to creating and editing business process flows.
Business process flows will show the name of the BPF instance, which is set at the time that the BPF instance is created. This means if the name in the BPF definition changes, new BPF instances will display the updated name, but older BPF instances will display the original name. It also means localized BPF definition names aren't displayed.
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