Here are ten insights from my workshop at Lean Kanban Global Summit last week in Washington DC, where participants ha...

Here are ten insights from my workshop at Lean Kanban Global Summit last week in Washington DC, where participants have built themselves from scratch the key metrics and analytics for predictability and flow as shown below.

As usual, Elabor8 committed to the community.

1. The three actionable metrics of flow are WIP, Lead time and Throughput

2. The most important thing you can do to improve predictability and flow is to match your arrival rate (commitment) with your departure rate (throughput)

3. Don't work with averages when you can work with distributions

4. Flow debt is when lead time is artificially reduced for some work in progress by “borrowing” lead time from other pieces of work

5. Poor pull-transaction policies and misused classes of service are the primary sources of flow debt

6. Use the 85 percentile of your lead time distribution as the SLA for your service delivery

7. When slicing the work, it's not about same-sizing; it's about right-sizing. Check your work items against the 85 percentile of your lead time distribution

8. The more you violate Little Law's assumptions, 
the less chance you have of being predictable

9. Queue time is your invisible enemy

10. The formula for evolutionary changes is: stressor, reflection mechanism and leadership