Factors affecting your development workflow and how to fix them

The workflow is the most important aspect to maintain the proper business operations of an organization. Workflow moves from ideation to the implementation of the ideas on the particular project. It is only the Engineering team that strategies different plans to drive long lasting improvements to your workflow.

Why Organization need formal processes?

Every organization needs some foundational process for continuous refinements to ensure the fast workflow process. The initial process in these organizations have flavor of these 3 fundamental steps:

New Ticket

Development

Review

The smooth workflow of an organization involves everything from identification of problematic patterns and behavior of the staffs followed by examining the issues and apply solutions to fix them to improve the efficiency flow. Let dive into the problem and solutions of the 5 fundamental steps needed to maintain the workflow:

Step 1

New Tickets: Works usually starts with a new ticket. WHen an organization receives new tickets or enquiry from their customers, the engineers interact with the customers regarding the same and identify the best solution to rectify the issue across the cycle time, lead time and workflow.

THe Problems: Projects manager finds it too long to assign new tickets.

Ways to fix it: This issue can be fixed using the pull system as the new tasks enter the organization sales funnels and engineers starts working on it. WIth pull systems, work stays at a constant flow.

PRoblem 2 — New tickets gets slower through the workflow due to lack of available resources

Ways to fix it — This issue can be fixed by optimizing the workflow efficiency which is a ration between the active time and estimated time to complete the task. Optimizing the flow efficiency instead of resource efficiency. This keeps the team busy and more focused towards the respective issue.

Step 2: Development

In the development phase of the organization, the workflow is mainly delayed due to unusual amount of time refactoring, tickets bouncing backward and high churn in the workflow.

Solution — This problem can be resolved by encouraging the team members to follow a more formal work pattern. Yo should be conscious about review the ticket backflow and churn on a regular basis with your team to understand the trends for refactoring and identify the barrier in the workflow process.

Problem 2 — Another problem faced by the organization is the overloaded team member

Solution — Every team has an expert to analyze the workflow process and handle the team work. IF the domain expertise of an organization lies in a critical area, the tasks should be assigned to multiple hand. THis will lower the work burden of a team leader to some extent.

Step 3: Review

In the review stage, organizations can collaborate together to resolve the issue and churn down the line.

Problem: In this phase, the organization usually faces the issue of code review church.

Solution — To fix this issue, organization needs to be more focused towards the delivery of the team work. Team members should collaborate together in the team meetings and ask for assistance to resolve the issues occurring in the workflow process. If the issue is related to the spring cycles then instead of finishing the sprint, team members should be encouraged to focus on the delivering the quality work.