Last week, one of our team became a Flow Ambassador after a two-day certification course in the Flow framework for accelerated business agility. So what does it mean to be a Flow Ambassador? And how can this new agile framework help with your digital transformation project?
Flow is one of the foundations of DevOps – we aim to deliver a regular flow of work while encouraging feedback and experimentation. Haydn Shaughnessy and Fin Goulding have published two books (Flow: A Handbook for Change Makers and 12 Steps to Flow) on the topic of Flow, a wider framework for business agility beyond software delivery and the Flow Ambassador certification builds on the teachings in these books.
Flow is a framework for effective digital transformation suitable for small businesses and Enterprises alike. Flow is an extension of and complimentary to “agile” and “devops”. The Flow framework extends beyond software development and out across the end-to-end process of identifying and delivering value to customers. Flow is about growing value-seeking behaviours in all your employees. Flow is a highly visual approach that encourages face-to-face social interactions. Flow is a way to equip your business so that it is ready to respond to rapid change and able to compete in a highly competitive future as you embrace cloud computing and rapid continuous delivery.
If you’re looking for a rigid and textbook scaled agile framework with a set of processes and artefacts, then the Flow framework isn’t for you. Flow doesn’t have rules to follow but instead encourages social interaction and value-seeking behaviours. As a Flow Ambassador, Emma isn’t guaranteed to magically transform your business into an elite organisation but she has been given the foundation and inspiration to act as the catalyst in your team for a new way of working.
Flow provides ideas of highly visual “walls” for displaying, sharing and evolving C-Suite strategy, customer feedback, market segmentation, employee recognition, business goals, areas of work and of course the content of your agile product backlog. Flow encourages the formation of multi-disciplinary teams who seek value in small iterations with no unit of work taking longer than 2 days. This helps ensure that there is a regular flow of valuable ideas into your engineering team backlogs now that they’ve embraced DevOps practices and CI/CD.
Flow provides a new way of thinking about valuable work in an agile business. With one of the first Flow Ambassadors here at nubeGO, we’re ready to help you find innovative new ways to apply lean, agile and DevOps principles across your business. Contact nubeGO to find out about our Cloud Readiness Assessments, Agile training and consultancy options.