Practical Strategies for Optimizing Flow, Teamwork and Visibility in a Changing Landscape
Dominica Degrandis (Planview), Chris Gallivan (Planview), Elisabeth Hendrickson (Curious Duck), Chuck Lafferty (ADP) & Matt Ring (John Deere)
This paper, published in the Fall 2024 Enterprise Technology Leadership Journal, addresses the challenges faced by technology organizations in a competitive and fast-moving market. The authors present six actionable takeaways inspired by two books: Making Work Visible and Team Topologies. These takeaways aim to help organizations optimize flow, teamwork, and visibility in a changing landscape where businesses are under increased budget pressure and rapid technological changes.
The paper uses a fictional narrative about Pat, a director of engineering, to illustrate common problems faced by technology leaders. It then provides practical solutions and strategies for exposing invisible work, reducing work-in-progress (WIP), making team APIs visible, recognizing trade-offs from conflicting priorities, remediating blocking dependencies, and creating effective work sequencing. Each solution is accompanied by reflections on the problem and specific actions that leaders can take to implement improvements in their organizations.
What's inside
Visibility — Exposing invisible work and making team APIs visible are crucial for understanding the true scope of work and improving communication between teams.
Work Management — Reducing WIP and implementing effective work sequencing can significantly improve focus, productivity, and time-to-market.
Dependencies — Identifying and remediating blocking dependencies is essential for improving flow and reducing delays in project delivery.
Prioritization — Understanding trade-offs from conflicting priorities and implementing better prioritization methods can help organizations balance multiple demands and improve overall efficiency.
Dominica DeGrandis is the foremost expert in Kanban Flow within the IT industry today. Her work has shown working IT teams how effectively improve workflow and optimize throughput to produce the best result throughout the value stream. Her passion involves the use of visual cues and transparency across teams and organizations to reveal mutually critical information. As Director of Training & Coaching at LeanKit, Dominica combines experience, practice and theory to help teams level up their capability. She blogs at ddegrandis.com and tweets at @dominicad.
Chris Gallivan is a principal flow advisor at Planview. Gallivan advises organizations on making work visible and improving the flow of value to customers. Prior to joining Planview, Gallivan had two decades of experience improving flow in the automotive industry at Chrysler. His experience ranges from DevOps dojos to platform engineering, from traditional software to embedded systems. In his life outside of work, Chris is the proud father of a two-pizza team and a lifelong musician.
Elisabeth HendricksonCurious Duck (at publication)▼▲
Elisabeth Hendrickson is a technology leader with over thirty years of experience in the tech industry, having led geographically distributed teams of engineers, product managers, and designers as VP R&D at a publicly traded company and VP Engineering at a Series B startup. She is the author of Explore It! and There's Always a Duck , and currently works with technology leaders to improve collaboration, decision making, and execution. Her philosophy centers on putting people first, focusing on incremental delivery and learning, and recognizing that there are many right ways to achieve outcomes depending on context, making her methodology-agnostic while emphasizing the importance of tight feedback loops and collaborative partnerships.
Now: Sr. Product & Engineering Coach, Global IT Strategy & Transformation, John Deere
Matt Ring is a Sr. Product & Engineering Coach with John Deere’s IT Strategy and Transformation organization. Matt works with leaders, practitioners and teams on helping them elevate their own product, lean-agile and DevOps ways of working, and in cultivating an organizational culture of continuous learning and experimentation.
