Flows & Value Streams
How Work Happens in Your Organization
Structure and Flow: A Disconnect
Parallel realities exist in every organization: how the organization is structured and how work actually happens. Meticulously designed org charts exist to define roles and relationships, power dynamics, and in most cases, their own goals, while the true flow of work follows a completely different path.
This fundamental disconnect shapes daily operations and strategic outcomes but remains largely invisible to many organizational leaders. A disconnect that directly impacts how effectively value is delivered to customers.
The Org Chart
The org chart represents a formal hierarchical structure of the company. It efficiently maps reporting relationships and role definitions.
Something of critical importance is lacking from the traditional org chart: the customer.
Org Chart Driven
An org chart-driven system is optimized for vertical alignment rather than collaboration. Individuals prioritize career advancement within their silos. Decision-making is aimed at job preservation. Each functional area, be it design, testing, development, coding, or operations, develops goals that reinforce the departmental boundaries set up by the org chart.
The org chart is now transformed into a power structure that shapes how information moves and decisions are made. Hierarchical pathways determine the means of communication, fragmenting initiatives that serve the customer. These boundaries and pathways calcify over time as leaders optimize for control within their domains.
This system results in power structures instead of value delivery, determining how people work and interact. Collaboration is not able to thrive as it is rare and replaced by formal handoffs between departments complete with their own set of negotiations.
Customer value-adding work must now navigate invisible walls, often getting diluted or lost in the process.
The Value Stream
A flow of activity that delivers some valuable outcome (product or service) for customers. Value streams reveal the dynamic nature of work and highlight where value is created, delayed, or diminished.
The Value Stream Map
An easy-to-see visual model representing the collective understanding of how value (work) flows to the customer.
“The sequence of activities required to design, produce, and deliver a good or service to a customer, and it includes the dual flows of information and material.” - Martin, K., and Osterling, M. [1]
Different views and examples of value stream maps:
How Work Gets Done
If you looked at an org chart and tracked how work flows across the organization, it would look like a snaking line. Weaving its way from department to department, team to team, and person to person through the various layers of scaled bureaucracy. The process burden lay hidden in the gaps between each of these parts.
Laying a value stream across the org chart could give a sense of how work flows across the organization. A more horizontal view.
How Information Flows
Up and Down the Org Chart
Information at the place the work happens is critical to understanding what work needs to be done and the flow of that work to the customer.
When information requests need to flow vertically up and then back down to the place the work happens, delay is but one concern. Information is also filtered and altered at each layer. Any critical context is easily lost as this information moves through formal channels.
Not unfamiliar is the scenario; status reports and updates flow up, decisions and priorities flow down.
At the Place the Work Happens
Formal and informal channels carry information at the place work happens.
Formal channels include team meetings, org meetings, training sessions, status reports, documentation, sprint events, quarterly reports, design docs, etc.
Informal channels include chat/IM, e-mail, pairing, teaming, and hallway chats, which represent how information is shared organically day-to-day.
In all of this, be it formal or informal channels, the information and knowledge needed to do the work, much like queues in a development process, remain mostly hidden in organizations.
The Richness of Communication
The ability to have meaningful conversations, communication, and ultimately collaboration is required to achieve an effective flow of valuable work to customers.
Different options of communication were shared by Alistair Cockburn in Agile Software Development [1] and a visual model on the Richness of Communication [2] showing how communication effectiveness increases with the richness of the communication channel.
This diagram demonstrates a progression from “cold” channels like documentation to “hot” channels like face-to-face communication at a whiteboard. The effectiveness of each channel gradually providing greater richness of communication.
To take the next evolutionary step in richness of communication, making it easy to share information, knowledge, and an awareness of what work is happening across an organization requires an expanding on the richness of communication [3].
These next steps, and answering the questions in the expansion, build upon the original insights while acknowledging the need for more systemic approaches to effective value stream flow.
How Do We Manage the Invisible
The larger the scale, the further away we get from the purpose of the work. An uncalculated cost of this scale is people unable to be effective in delivering the value they were hired to deliver.
Seeing It
Knowledge flow isn’t linear; it branches, merges, and transforms as it moves through the organization. Context decay is not easily visible. Unlike a stuck ticket in a development queue, we don’t know the context has been lost until much later. The queue in this case is much more difficult to define. Knowledge can sit in e-mails, chat messages, documents, or even people’s heads.
Visualizing how knowledge flows, seeing where context is lost, seeing how knowledge is validated, and seeing what is done to restore lost context is a decent first step in attempting to understand the system and possibly inch towards managing the invisible. Having this information now seen, perhaps the need is to design organizations that inherently preserve the context and the flow of knowledge.
Questions
Who holds key knowledge?
Who needs this knowledge most?
What official and unofficial channels exist?
How do people actually share day-to-day?
Where do important conversations happen?
Authors Note
In the coming weeks, there will be a few gatherings opened up to discuss the ideas shared in this article and workshops to follow on seeing knowledge flow in your organization. These workshops will be to help visualize the knowledge flow, understand the sources, understand the costs, and explore options on where to act and make meaningful changes that create, sustain, and evolve learning organizations.
These workshops will be published on Substack, Ticket Tailor, and LinkedIn.
References
[1] Martin, K., and Osterling, M., 2013, “Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation”
[2] Cockburn, Alistair., 2001, “Agile Software Development”, Addison-Wesley
[3] Cockburn, Alistair., and Ambler, Scott W., 2002, Image - Richness of Communication
[4] Pipito, C., and Zuill, W., and Meadows, K., 2023, Image - Expanding on Richness of Communication
Great highlight of the least-travelled territory of work!
Information flow, signal-to-noise, radiation, access, and value are so easy to ignore because they're invisible, but also because they're hard problems to wrangle.