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Flow metrics tell you what is happening in your delivery pipeline, but they rarely reveal the why. What if you could dig deeper and uncover the root causes behind those numbers?The key lies in transforming raw data into actionable insights through intelligent visualization. By leveraging AI-powered analysis tools and Python, you can move beyond surface-level metrics to understand the underlying patterns that drive your team's performance.From Data to Discovery in MinutesTake the Viz Flow Item Analyzer (FIA) CSV export, for example. Combined with Python's visualization capabilities, this data becomes a powerful lens for examining your delivery process. Scatterplots of flow time data are particularly revealing—they expose individual bottlenecks and outliers that aggregate metrics often mask.When you can see these friction points clearly, you can begin to categorize and systematically address them. As the saying goes: "You

We’ve published a fully actionable Flow-Based Planning Checklist that teams, product managers, and leaders can use to build realistic, capacity-based plans — not wishful thinking.✅ Covers both Per Team (Story level) and Product/Value Stream (Epic level)✅ Includes Flow Distribution, OKR allocation, WIP triage, blocked work, bottlenecks, dependencies, experiments, and Epic flow control✅ Copilot prompts included to pull real data — no guessing✅ Designed to improve predictability, protect teams, and deliver business outcomes quarter over quarter🔎 Use it before every planning cycle to surface system reality, make smarter tradeoffs, and prevent overload before it happens.Link here

One of the biggest challenges in portfolio management isn’t tracking work — it’s knowing, with confidence: Will we actually deliver the work we committed to? Are we already overloaded? Where is work at risk — and what can we do about it now? We’ve published a practical, step-by-step guide you can use immediately — with or without Copilot — to answer these questions using Flow Metrics in plain business language.✅ No jargon✅ No formulas✅ Direct portfolio questions you’re already asking✅ Simple Copilot prompts you can use right now👉 Read the full guide hereIf you have questions or want help applying this in your portfolio, feel free to reply or reach out!

Most OKR guidance focuses on how to write good OKRs.Very few get into how OKRs live inside the real delivery system once work starts flowing.✅ How do OKRs connect to funding?✅ How do teams prioritize work against them daily?✅ What roles own what?✅ What cadences prevent capacity drift?✅ How do leaders keep delivery aligned to outcomes?I put together a practical OKR Operating Cadence that covers: Strategic vs Operational OKRs (and how they work together) Roles & responsibilities across leadership, teams, product, and delivery Daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly cadences to maintain alignment Flow OKRs to connect delivery performance to business outcomes The leadership habits that make or break real-world OKR success ✅ Works across Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, or hybrid delivery models.👉 Full guide here: 

🚧 Do you enjoy solving delivery bottlenecks?Ever feel like there's always that one thing slowing everything else down?If so, you have to check out Clarke Ching’s Bottleneck Detective's Manifesto. It’s a short, sharp, and seriously insightful guide to spotting and solving constraints that quietly kill flow in your delivery system.🔍 It’s a fun read, packed with clarity, wit, and wisdom — whether you're deep into Flow Framework, Theory of Constraints, or just curious about improving how your teams deliver.Have you read it? What stood out to you?Let’s swap notes — what bottlenecks are you currently wrestling with? Link here: 

Here are some example prompts and short videos. Please let us know what you think? I would love to hear what your favorite prompts are!https://success.planview.com/Planview_Viz/Using_Planview_Copilot_in_Viz/Prompt_LibraryI am really enjoying using it to generate monthly flow review insights product by product along with recommendations. What used to take me a lot of time I can now do in minutes, not to mention I love Copilot’s “personality” encouraging teams and findings wins in some of the responses I have seen!  

🎉 Exciting News: Planview Connect 2025 Mark your calendars for April 23-25 - Planview Connect 2025 is coming to Florida! Here's what you can look forward to at this year's immersive experience:✨ What's in Store:Learn from real-world success stories shared by leading organizations Get hands-on training directly from Planview experts Connect with peers from various industries Get a sneak peek at upcoming features and product innovations Level up your expertise with certification opportunities⏰ Important: Early bird pricing ends January 31st!Ready to dive in? Check out: 🔍 Full agenda overview ❓ Event FAQDrop a comment below if you're planning to join us or have any questions. We can't wait to see you th

🔄 Community Discussion: Using Flow Distribution & Metrics in PI/Quarterly PlanningHi Viz Community!As many of us prepare for upcoming PI/Quarterly planning, let's discuss how you're using Flow Distribution and Flow Metrics to inform your planning decisions. The Flow Framework® guidance provides recommendations for balancing Features, Defects, Risk, and Debt investments, but we'd love to hear how you're applying these in practice during your planning events.Please see the attached PDFs for Guidance on how to use Flow Metrics in Quarterly Planning as well as how to plan/balance Flow Distribution. 📊 Some key discussion areas:How do you use Flow metrics to set PI objectives? What role does Flow Distribution play in capacity planning? How do you balance planned vs unplanned work in your PI commitments? What data do you present to stakeholders during PI planning?Share your experiences:How do yo

When I woke up today I didn’t feel older, but I know I am. When I weighed myself I lost a couple pounds since yesterday.Nothing stays the same. Some things improve (my weight). Some things degrade (my age).Your flow performance is the same.Many people assume flow performance is the same as it was 6 months ago. It is not.You are either improving or degrading.This is the second law of thermodynamics and it holds for flow. 

Attached is the Planview Flow Methodology Scrum Master & Product Owner Quick Start Checklist provides a quick and practical way to jumpstart improving flow through simple steps that take less than 5 minutes. By focusing on daily actions like unblocking stalled work, monitoring aging tasks, and prioritizing effectively, teams can see immediate benefits. Even if you only do one thing, such as leveraging the Flow Optimizer to stabilize Flow Time, you can make a measurable impact.While there are many additional strategies to explore, these foundational actions lay the groundwork for meaningful improvement. One particularly impactful practice is using headcount timeline events and timeline events to provide critical context—both within your product team and to stakeholders evaluating flow at the portfolio level.Key Benefits Quick Wins:

Hi Community,I’m excited to share the Quarterly Portfolio Review Template, an actual customer example of how Flow Metrics are used in Portfolio Reviews with Product Leads and Executives. This template provides a practical way to visualize and discuss progress, ensuring alignment and actionable insights at both quarterly and monthly intervals.What’s New and Coming SoonThe current version is available now, but I’m excited to announce that the next version will be published shortly, featuring:Portfolio Flow Metrics Screen: A consolidated view of Flow Metrics across the portfolio. Waste Calculations: A deeper dive into areas of inefficiency to uncover opportunities for improvement. Enhanced Analysis: Including bottleneck identification, aging work trends, and Flow Metric trends to support more effective decision-making.How This Template

Often when I do an analysis for customers, I find that less than 10% of the work that is currently in progress (work that has been started and not yet completed) is the priority (strategic, linked to improving the desired business results/OKRs).I find that because there is a prioritized backlog per team, with separate priorities per team, or teams working on different priority features that lower priority work is often focused on at the expense of higher priority work.This is very different from the original scrum notion of a single ordered product backlog where the available capacity swarms around the highest priority item(s), making sure any priority work that gets blocked gets unblocked rather than instead pulling in lower priority work to make sure everyone “stays busy”. What are some tips or tricks that you use to ensure your team is working on the highest priority, value add work? Some practices that I see used that come to mind include:

 Link to the report is here

I’m excited that the new Viz Navigation has been released! It is great to be able to see the hierarchy of Products in the left Nav bar, I feel it makes it easier to navigate across Products and Groups/Portfolios.  I’m also looking forward to hearing the communities experience with the updated Navigation! 

As seen in the Viz in product announcement: Coming soon: Flow OptimizerTake the mystery out of your Flow Metrics with actionable, data-based recommendations on how to improve software delivery. The Flow Optimizer analyzes the potential impact of your work-in-progress and will also ensure your value streams are modeled to perfection. Register for our first 10-minute Tuesday webinar to learn more.  

Had a great discussion today around how AI aiding agile/flow transformations may change the approach to traditional transformations and traditional coaching and how to best prepare organizations for these changes. A simple exercise is to imagine that the desired functionality is already available, then what is next? How will the insights, impediments be handled? Is there a structure in place to take action, what actions will you allow to be automated vs not, for those not automated, what roles/cadence/responsibility will be necessary to take action, and what speed is necessary to manually make the decisions/take action given your context. Was a fun conversation, would love to hear how you are experiencing or see for the future of improving flow with AI!

A team I work with shared this with me, I wanted to share it with others in case interesting. The team reviews their Flow Metrics in their Sprint Retro. They noticed that their Flow Efficiency had decreased. They opened the bottleneck finder for this time period and saw that the wait states "verification" and "stalled" had the highest State Duration Index (SDI), which is not typical for them.They could prove this was not typical for them by picking a time period over the past several weeks and looking at the bottleneck finder. Typically their active state “In Progress” had the highest SDI. Something had changed to drive up the delay in Verification over the past sprint. They formed an experiment to see if they could decrease the time spent in verification. Their hypothesis was that by decreasing the wait time in Verification, this would increase their Flow Efficiency. Stay tuned to hear how their experiment turns out! 

@chris.gallivan and I were discussing in the Flow Framework Community Bi-weekly Flow Time meeting (open to all) about the phenomena that many organizations measure how long it takes to complete a story once it is pulled into the sprint, but very few measure how long it takes to deliver value to the customer (“fast” feedback).Despite using a variety of common agile practices, companies are still experiencing less transparency into when the work will be completed, and work is taking a year or two to deliver the value requested to the customer. In some cases, it is taking longer to deliver with agile methodologies than when project based methods were used. What could be happening here? Teams are doing the right things, following the good agile practices they have been taught, breaking down stories into small chunks, completing in a sprint

Has anyone ever looked behind the curtains at their flow time and noticed the amount of variability in the data?For most of my customers, the flow time ranges from 0 days (yes a lot of 0s exist in the number), to 600+ days. When you stare at this data long enough, you start to see what appear to be lanes in the traffic.The fast lane has work which completes in a few days or less. This is transactional work. On some teams there is a high volume of this work. The pro-tip to improve flow for the fast lane is to automate or eliminate the need to do this work at all.There also appears to be the slow lane which rides atop the data. This data has flow times exceeding a year in many cases. This is the realm of almost abandoned work. At one point it sounded like a great idea, but something else more urgent superseded it. The pro-tip here is to understand how work makes it into this lane, and then try to figure how to prevent it from happening. One idea would be to establ

  If you haven’t already, be sure to check out the Planview Flow Methodology. Based on our years of experience working with customers to optimize flow, we have created guidance based on patterns of success we see. We strive to release new content on the 15th and 30th of each month.  I’d love to hear your feedback of what you find helpful or any guidance that you would like to see or share!  You can access the Flow Methodology through the Diamond Icon in the upper right of Viz Planview Flow Methodology Icon in Upper Right of Viz Or through

Hi Flow Friends! I am so excited to see this community form. It is such a great opportunity to connect and share flow experiences and questions across the community! I know many have been looking forward to the ability to connect and learn across different companies/customers. I look forward to hearing about your journey with flow so far, whether you’re just getting started, or have many years experience! It is great to hear what is working, what challenges are faced and how others have overcome them.  Flow has been my passion for the past 20+ years. I am currently the Product Manager for Flow Methodology. Prior to coming to Product, my background is in Enterprise Lean-Agile Transformations, working almost every role in Software Engineering, as well as some time in Manufacturing as a Lean Six Sigma Blackbelt. I’ve had the joy and privilege of helping thousands of people implement flow across the whole value stream. I work across many industries but have spent th