The most common thing a project does with its life is wait for someone with authority to decide something. That wait sits on no plan, consumes no capacity, and appears on no report, which is exactly why it goes unmanaged. Treat your steering board as the constrained resource it is, and the queue in front of it turns out to be one of the most expensive things in your portfolio.
Read the article →There is a team in your organisation that has just got faster, and it has made no difference to anything you deliver. That is not bad luck, it is arithmetic: an improvement made anywhere other than the constraint produces no extra throughput, and an improvement made upstream of it usually makes delivery worse. Here is where your improvement budget should have gone instead.
Read the article →Somewhere in your portfolio is a piece of work that has been finished more than once. We call it iteration, refinement, another pass. A large part of it is rework, and in a constrained portfolio it is far more expensive than the hours to do it again: it spends your scarcest resource twice, its cost escalates with how late you catch the error, and it re-enters the queue as new work in progress that slows everything else. Worse, the conditions that cause it are the ones it makes worse.
Read the article →Pausing a project feels like the safe, reversible move: you stop the spend and keep your options open. In a constrained portfolio it is usually the most expensive of the three things you can do with in-flight work, because the value clock never pauses, restart is not resume, and the capacity you freed was never really freed.
Read the article →A dependency looks free: it is just an arrow between two boxes on a plan. In flow terms it is one of the most expensive things you can add to a portfolio, because it forces you to wait on the slowest contributor, couples risks that used to be independent, and hides a queue that lives on no one's plan. Here is the economics of the seam.
Read the article →A project reports green for months, then turns red weeks before the deadline. That is not dishonesty, it is a measurement problem. Percent-complete tells you how much plan you have used, never how much risk remains. Buffer burn does, and it warns you while there is still time to act.
Read the article →A big project is not just more work than a small one. It ties up your constraint for longer, hides its problems until the end, and returns nothing until it is finished. Batch size is an economic choice, and most portfolios make it by accident.
Read the article →Starting a project feels like progress, so work gets released the moment it is approved. Releasing it before it is ready does not advance it, it stalls it, and the constraint pays for the restart.
Read the article →Every piece of Flow Economics advice begins with 'find your constraint.' Almost nobody tells you how, and the obvious answer, your busiest team, is usually the wrong one.
Read the article →Every task estimate carries hidden safety to protect against uncertainty. Three well-known behaviours consume it before it can protect anything, which is why padded plans still slip, and why pooling the safety fixes it.
Read the article →The most common thing a project does with its life is wait for someone with authority to decide something. That wait sits on no plan, consumes no capacity, and appears on no report, which is exactly why it goes unmanaged. Treat your steering board as the constrained resource it is, and the queue in front of it turns out to be one of the most expensive things in your portfolio.
Read the article →There is a team in your organisation that has just got faster, and it has made no difference to anything you deliver. That is not bad luck, it is arithmetic: an improvement made anywhere other than the constraint produces no extra throughput, and an improvement made upstream of it usually makes delivery worse. Here is where your improvement budget should have gone instead.
Read the article →Somewhere in your portfolio is a piece of work that has been finished more than once. We call it iteration, refinement, another pass. A large part of it is rework, and in a constrained portfolio it is far more expensive than the hours to do it again: it spends your scarcest resource twice, its cost escalates with how late you catch the error, and it re-enters the queue as new work in progress that slows everything else. Worse, the conditions that cause it are the ones it makes worse.
Read the article →Pausing a project feels like the safe, reversible move: you stop the spend and keep your options open. In a constrained portfolio it is usually the most expensive of the three things you can do with in-flight work, because the value clock never pauses, restart is not resume, and the capacity you freed was never really freed.
Read the article →A dependency looks free: it is just an arrow between two boxes on a plan. In flow terms it is one of the most expensive things you can add to a portfolio, because it forces you to wait on the slowest contributor, couples risks that used to be independent, and hides a queue that lives on no one's plan. Here is the economics of the seam.
Read the article →A project reports green for months, then turns red weeks before the deadline. That is not dishonesty, it is a measurement problem. Percent-complete tells you how much plan you have used, never how much risk remains. Buffer burn does, and it warns you while there is still time to act.
Read the article →A big project is not just more work than a small one. It ties up your constraint for longer, hides its problems until the end, and returns nothing until it is finished. Batch size is an economic choice, and most portfolios make it by accident.
Read the article →Starting a project feels like progress, so work gets released the moment it is approved. Releasing it before it is ready does not advance it, it stalls it, and the constraint pays for the restart.
Read the article →Every piece of Flow Economics advice begins with 'find your constraint.' Almost nobody tells you how, and the obvious answer, your busiest team, is usually the wrong one.
Read the article →Every task estimate carries hidden safety to protect against uncertainty. Three well-known behaviours consume it before it can protect anything, which is why padded plans still slip, and why pooling the safety fixes it.
Read the article →