In many applications of Flow - project management, software development, manufacturing, supply chain management, sales pipeline - the goal is to get through the full process as quickly as possible. For quick turnaround operations, this often looks like producing more items per time (more story points; more physical goods; etc). But for longer operations, improving flow is often stated as “go faster.”
And this is sometimes a problem in people’s minds. We hear “faster,” and we think that we must be cutting corners or doing things that break the normal flow of work (breaking the rules). Just look at the development of the Covid-19 vaccines - something that normally takes years was completed in roughly nine months. There are a lot of people who are convinced that they must have taken shortcuts that reduce the safety of the vaccine. While they obviously haven’t collected years worth of safety data, the main way they were able to "go faster” was by removing wait times - jumping the queues.
In a situation like this, any time that the work has to wait for someone to approve or for a meeting to make a decision, that blocks flow. And things that block flow make things take longer. In any project, that is a killer. The longer it takes, the more things that can go wrong; the less we can make selling the product.
A client mentioned a great quote from coach John Wooden. “Be quick, but don’t hurry” that says it all for me.
To enable your work to flow faster, find those places where work just sits and waits. Is there a large queue of work waiting for the next operation? Is there a queue waiting for someone’s approval? Is there a queue waiting for missing inputs? All of these are opportunities to remove queues, and move the whole project faster. (Please note that with larger projects, some queues are actually good things to protect the flow of the FULL project. One of the reasons we need to understand the critical path / critical chain of the project.)