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How to keep my Team predictable?
How to keep my Team predictable?

As a team lead, predictability is a critical metric you want to track for delivery flow. Let's find out how.

José Caldeira avatar
Written by José Caldeira
Updated over 2 years ago

Predictability comes from having a clear value stream map for the team delivery flow. You want to ensure that items are moving as smoothly as possible from idea creation (PR committed) to having it in the hands of users (PR Released).

During the sprint, or similar if you use kanban, you should be validating the following data points and dashboards, to understand if something is blocking your team.

  1. Number of items in flight;

  2. Wait time of items in flight;

Number of items in flight

Select your team in Athenian and check the small gray boxes (to see how many items you have in flight). If the sum of this number is larger than your team size, then you have too many items in flight and you should start closing them. Predictability comes from having a good state of flow. To improve flow we want to remove waste, which is represented by item wait time.

Wait time of items in flight

Wait time is critical to help you identify where your delivery process is facing bottlenecks. To have an immediate impact on the team's value stream follow these steps:

  1. Open the sections that have items in flight, like this merge section;

  2. Go to the PRs, and filter by a wait state;

  3. 📣 If the time of the item is above your average time for the section go back to the team and check what can be done to unblock that PR;

🎯 Remember that you want to use Athenian to consistently identify and remove impediments out of the teams' way.

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