Flow Engineering: From Value Stream Mapping to Effective Action
"Flow Engineering is an 'actionable textbook' for product teams seeking to define value, build clarity, and enable flow....[Flow Engineering] serves as the glue to interconnect target outcomes, current and future value streams, and a set of actions to go from a sub-optimal current state to a desirable future state. With this book, you not only get a map but also a compass!"
--Manjunath Bhat, VP Analyst for Software Engineering, Gartner
Tired of misalignment, friction, and stalled workflow? Flow Engineering is a practical guide to using value stream mapping techniques to align teams, unlock innovation, and optimize performance.
Based on foundations from Value Stream Mapping, cybernetics, and the Toyota Production System, Flow Engineering's lightweight and iterative practices build the value, clarity, and flow required for effective collaboration and collective action. Written by Value Stream Mapping experts Steve Pereira and Andrew Davis, Flow Engineering provides a step-by-step guide for running fast-paced mapping workshops that rapidly build shared understanding.
Using five key maps to facilitate collaborative "flow conversations," Pereira and Davis show how teams can surface tangled process dependencies, conflicting priorities, and unspoken assumptions that grind progress to a halt. The result? A clear roadmap owned by the people doing the work to accelerate innovation cycles, optimize workflows, and achieve more effective coordination.
Applicable across any industry, Flow Engineering's techniques have helped leading organizations improve critical workflows like customer onboarding, product development, and hiring.
It's time to stop trying one-size-fits-all frameworks to find value, clarity, and flow to improve culture and performance. Flow Engineering meets your organization where it's at and shows you how to move it where it needs to go.
"As a CTO grappling with the challenges of managing diverse teams in a fast-paced tech environment, Flow Engineering provides a refreshing perspective on leadership in the modern workplace. It's not just about theoretical ideas; the book offers practical tools and frameworks to unlock hidden value within teams and drive innovation. I highly recommend this book to any leader seeking to inspire their teams and deliver greater value to their customers and organization."
--France Roy, CTO, Balsam Brands, former CTO, Anheuser-Busch InBev DTC
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Steve Pereira has spent over two decades improving the flow of work across organizations. He's worked through tech support, IT management, build and release engineering, and as a founding CTO for enterprise SaaS. He serves as lead consultant for Visible Value Stream Consulting, as a board advisor to the Value Stream Management Consortium, Chair of the OASIS Value Stream Management Interoperability technical committee, and co-founder of the Flow Collective to bring flow-focused professionals together. Since 2017, he has been developing and facilitating Flow Engineering to make flow improvement in large organizations accessible, collaborative, and actionable.
Andrew Davis is the author of Mastering Salesforce DevOps. He's a Salesforce architect, developer, and product leader with a focus on the human side of software development. He's the leading figure in introducing DevOps concepts to the Salesforce world. Trained as an engineer, he spent fifteen years as a Buddhist monk, teaching meditation and personal transformation and helping develop communities of practice. These days, he studies the intersection of business, technology, and psychology through systems thinking.
"As a CTO grappling with the challenges of managing diverse teams in a fast-paced tech environment, Flow Engineering provides a refreshing perspective on leadership in the modern workplace. It's not just about theoretical ideas; the book offers practical tools and frameworks to unlock hidden value within teams and drive innovation. I highly recommend this book to any leader seeking to inspire their teams and deliver greater value to their customers and organization."--France Roy, CTo Balsam Brands, former CTO Anheuser-Busch InBev DTC
"Flow Engineering stands as an exemplary, insightful, and hands-on guide for those seeking an in-depth grasp of flow principles and their application to engineering challenges in the real world. Having utilized value stream maps to scrutinize value streams across system engineering, business, and consulting endeavors for numerous years, I can attest to the book's effectiveness. It succinctly defines the essence of Flow Engineering as the identification and eradication of waste within processes, aiming to enhance overall productivity. This work is an indispensable resource for professionals and enthusiasts alike, offering clarity, precision, and practical strategies to master flow concepts and optimize process efficiency."--Marc Hornbeek, CEO, Engineering DevOps Consulting and author of Engineering DevOps
"In a world of SAFe, Six Sigma, RACI charts, and more, why can't there be a scalable way of approaching these problems where there are clear rules to use in a simple way? Enter Flow Engineering. Pereira and Davis take you through the steps necessary, and the things to know, to quickly bring your entire organization into a nearly harmonious state of flow."--Dave Mangot, author of DevOps Patterns for Private Equity
"As organizations seek to move away from slow, project-centric approaches with complex dependencies towards operating models based on an internal marketplace of flow-centric service providers, it is vital to have a set of techniques to find and enable flow at scale. I love the collaborative mapping techniques in Flow Engineering because they really help to make change happen and results real. Embedding awareness inside humans in the organization using collaborative workshops is a highly effective, enduring way to shift towards business agility at speed and scale. Essential reading."--Matthew Skelton, CEO of Conflux and co-author of Team Topologies
"Finally, someone has taken the complexity out of value stream mapping and left us with a method that anyone can use to move our workflow closer to our ideal vision."--Adam Hawkins, Director Site Reliability Engineering, Skillshare
"Organizations are messy; they're endlessly complex; and worst of all, they're always changing. So thank the heavens for books like this. Flow Engineering is a landmark work! A practical and thoughtful guide to helping teams and organizations align on outcomes, iteratively deliver a flow of value, and continuously improve. It combines insights from both physical and digital engineering disciplines and synthesizes decades of learning, both practical and academic, into one accessible volume. Read this book. Practice these techniques. Let the value flow."--Matt K. Parker, author of A Radical Enterprise
"Pereira and Davis bring a pragmatic and effective approach to think about value streams at scale. Rather than a step-by-step fixed path, they offer a set of tools that can be used and recombined to achieve a state of flow, while respecting our human nature."--João Rosa, CEO Impactfulness and co-author of Visual Collaboration Tools
"Pereira and Davis have identified a real sweet spot for creating actionable change with minimum friction. I hope more people will be inspired to follow these practices not only start thinking clearly, collaboratively, and practically, but to actually build the muscle of continuous improvement. It's something I know my clients have struggled with even when they have great data showing them where the problems are. Going from seeing the data to acting on the data is always the hard step, and I love the way this book has articulated a very simple, repeatable process for doing this."--Krishna Kumar, Founder and CTO Exathink Research
"The shift towards Agile, Lean, DevOps, and Value Stream Management has revolutionized software delivery practices, but a focus on flow is crucial to success. Flow Engineering is a critical resource in this effort, offering a practical framework with visual mapping techniques and step-by-step guidance. It brings readers accessible methods for identifying constraints, streamlining processes, and achieving measurable outcomes. This book is indispensable for technology leaders spearheading team engagement and efficiency, and driving transformative change."--Phil Clark, Vice President of Parchment Technology at Instructure Inc., formerly VP Head of Engineering at Parchment LLC
"Despite the promise of constraints-focused improvement, accessible practical guidance, visibility, and alignment to stakeholders are persistent gaps to overcome. Flow Engineering represents a distinct opportunity to practically enact improvement, while building alignment, clarity, and competence. It meets leaders where they are, and quickly guides them to flow improvement along with their organization, not against it."--Tony Saldanha, President Transformant, author of Revolutionizing Business Operations
"The case studies, examples, and exercises in this book will provide education to the organization and build muscle for high-performance collaboration. The authors advocate for the right balance between prescriptive and generative approaches recognizing that both approaches are required to enable meaningful, long-lasting change. They will skillfully step you through the change process for your organization meeting you where you are. Take your organization on the journey with them--you will come out delivering value continuously and collaboratively."--Sejal Amin, CTO Shutterstock
"Scaling Agile + DevOps within the enterprise remains a persistent and thorny problem. Flow Engineering does an excellent job outlining the issues of scale and provides an effective framework for focusing on delivering more value."--Chris Condo, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
"Pereira and Davis lovingly remind us of the human costs of scale-turned-sprawl that plagues all but the best of today's organizations. They also make clear the business costs. Most importantly, they have synthesized the best thinking from DevOps, Lean, and workplace psychology to provide a clear, specific set of instructions to help organizations flow. To read Flow Engineering is to experience flow itself."--Meredith Bell, CEO, AutoRABIT
"I have been passionate about the flow of value ever since I was exposed to value stream mapping over a decade ago, and I've been attempting to make it accessible to the large organizations I've worked at ever since. This book has now made the concept of flow accessible and practical for everyone. I wish I had this guidance for the past decade and can't wait for this to be shared with the industry."--Courtney Kissler, SVP, Customer and Retail Technology Starbucks
"The authors' conviction in the inherent greatness of teams resonates, compelling readers to embark on their own journey of unlocking the untapped potential within their organizations."--Laura Garrison, CTO, LocatorX
"Flow Engineering will guide you through complexity and help you create value in situations where processes and people are more challenging than any specific tool. This is wisdom."--Bruno Pereira, CEO, Elvenworks, and CTO, AutoRABIT
"Scaling agile remains an unsolved problem. There are numerous theoretical discussions and even more frameworks that claim to provide convenient recipes. This book is unique in bringing together practical approaches with the understanding necessary to make them actually work in the real world."--Jeff Sussna, Author of Designing Delivery
"Flow Engineering...offers a clear path to transforming not just workflows but organizational culture itself."--Shannon Howe Tran, Principal Architect Director, Salesforce
"Steve and Andrew have crafted a brilliant combination of theory and principles, allied with clean language, clear visuals, and practical examples. Flow Engineering leverages mapping in ways that are immediately useful, collaborative, and visceral--bringing collective clarity and engagement through simple-to-learn process steps. For all of us on missions to improve colleague engagement and organisational performance, this excellent content provides the meaning and impetus to pursue greater flow."--Richard James, Managing Director, Tech Transformation Unit Lead, Accenture
"Flow Engineering is an indispensable guide for building value, clarity, and flow in your organisation....[with]valuable tools, tips, and hints to help you visualise and optimise the flow of value in your organisation."--Jon Smart, author of Sooner Safer Happier
