From Friction to Flow – Flow Engineering in practice

2026-02-06
Video
Think Flow

Bottlenecks in business critical development are business constraints that are often hard to see. In a webinar on Feb 5, we talked about the need for visualising bottlenecks and come to action to remove them using Practices from Flow Engineering

Think Flow and Steve Pereira, Visible Flow Consulting, held the webinar ”From Friction to Flow – Flow Engineering in practice” on the 5th of February.

There was a high level of engagement throughout the webinar that confirmed something we see across many organisations where we work today: flow is a highly relevant business concern – not just an engineering concern.

As discussed during the session, bottlenecks in development flows act as real business constraints. They increase lead times, reduce predictability and quietly turn time into cost.

Unfortunally most of the organizations we work with don’t invest enough time identifying these bottlenecks so they have a hard time improving efficiency and effectivness.

Together with Steve Pereira, we explored how Flow Engineering provides a lightweight and systematic way to:

make bottlenecks visible
understand common flow problems and their symptoms
improve delivery performance with existing capacity

Questions & answers

Question: Very similar situation, starting value stream mapping for a globally distributed org, is there any guidance on whether we organise and thus optimise our business around the product families or customer journeys ?

Answer: Our recommendation is to first define and get an agreement in what you want to get out of it. This is the first element in flow engineering. When this is clear you know where to look and don’t need to look at all places. This gives guidance to for example with product family or customer journeys or a different place that you haven’t had in mind before.
Answer: Can be valuable to start small, with “selected” product family and improve flow where it is a good starting.

Question: We are about to start piloting value stream mapping as a concept within v large company. As we are looking to use this at all different levels – portfolio / strategy down to team level.
What would be your no1 recommendation when starting on this journey? especially when not everyone is bought into this. ie: they want the outcome but not take the time to look at this

Answer: It is important to agree on the area you would like to focus and get alignment on it. What is the goal?
by also zooming in quite early on what we would like to focus on, we can skip mapping less critical parts and getting quicker to most powerful insights.

Question: What for advice can you give to get peoples mindset changed, as they are to busy looking at the end-to-end flow

One key to move how we think and act is to make the problems visible. There is often quite some magic happening when key players get a shared simple understanding of where the issues are.
The big difference to standard VSM is that in flow engineering is very lightweight. These sessions are only 1-2 hours long. This makes it lot easier to get started and still give a lot of value.