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Lean teams

A lean pipeline dashboard is useful to help gain visibility of the pipeline of work that is being undertaken by the team or teams towards a shared goal. The pipeline helps teams to pass jobs, projects and customers between one another, share information and resources between each other and work collaboratively to create an efficient and productive workflow at a higher level in the business. The dashboard helps the team to see the flow of work through the pipeline: it gives a view of the stages prior to and following their own, and raises awareness of these related and dependent stages.

Running a business effectively and efficiently while pushing forward with growth plans can be a difficult balance. As volume of work increases, existing processes and systems used to manage the workload may not sustain the higher volumes effectively. Mapping and monitoring pipelines such as the customer journey can help teams to sustain workflow as it increases by highlighting blocks and issues as they evolve.

• A lean workflow board can work very well to help the team to work collectively in passing work between each other.
• Boards help to raise awareness by allowing the teams to see where work is in the pipeline, what work is soon to reach them, and what progress has been made on work they have passed along.

A pipeline board is a simple way to represent the flow, volume and velocity of work travelling through the business. Depending on the type of work being undertaken, clients, projects, jobs or products are represented on cards and their status tracked on a pipeline broken down into various relevant stages.

• Regular stand-up and retrospective meetings are held around the board to discuss the status of work, update the board and hand over work to the next stage.
• Within each stage the card can be in four states – to do, doing, done or waiting to show its status.
• Visual representations of pipelines help teams to see the status of work, where there are bottlenecks and delays in the process and how to evolve the pipeline to be more productive and efficient.
• Optimum and maximum capacities can be identified by measuring the throughput of work to find the optimum speed and volume that can be processed efficiently, while maintaining quality outputs and happy teams.
• Lean efficiencies (Section 19) can be analysed to identify ways to change and improve the pipeline by removing waste, reallocating talent and ensuring that workflow is optimised.

Customer journey

The customer pipeline in Figure 27.1 shows a client’s journey through a business. Each card represents a client and their position and status within the pipeline.

On this customer pipeline board we can see that there are a lot of prospects in progress but work seems to be blocked at the quotation stage. This might be where there is a delay in receiving feedback from the potential customers and converting the quote into a contractual agreement. There is only one contract in progress but the delivery stage is currently busy.

Figure 27.1 New customer lean pipeline

Looking forward, the teams may find that there is a lack of work to deliver if the quotes are not unblocked and converted into contracts, or prospects convert quickly, which would leave the delivery team with capacity to spare. This is a good example of where the team can swarm around the blocked quotes and future leads to help convert them into contracted work.

There also appears to be a backlog of work to be actioned in the retention stage. This may be because the team are currently concentrating their efforts on generating new prospects, or it could be that customer retention is a weakness in the pipeline and is not being actioned or managed appropriately.

Enabling teams to work throughout the pipeline helps to develop teams that are multi-skilled and understand the phases that occur before and after their work. This helps to raise awareness and appreciation of how their actions are related to and impact upon others’ work.

This physical visual representation of a pipeline can become difficult if there is a large volume of projects, clients or products in progress. In this instance, the board can be used to focus in on specific areas or show work at a higher level. For example, the board might focus on a specific market segment or new products in development.