What is Unified Flow?

Unified Flow is a management method for handling multiple teams working on various initiatives by sharing work queues and balancing these initiatives through flow pressure or flow load.

September/23/2023 - 4 minutes reading

However, for all this to work, several practices are interesting to implement to address the different problems that can arise from sharing. These practices are called Unified Flow because the existence of multiple initiatives and teams is a common pattern in the market.

Therefore, we say that Unified Flow is a way to scale Kanban, Flow, and Agile. It uses various concepts from Kanban, Flow, XP, and Agile. Also, it allows for managing more than one team, moving beyond the team level to scale topics within organizations.

One important thing to understand about Unified Flow is the learning that a unified queue is more efficient than separate queues and handles work variability better. Donald Reinertsen shows this in the book The Principles of Product Development Flow. Taller used Don Reinertsen's teachings to apply and formalize Unified Flow as a method, and another inspiration came from the work of Objective. Together, these two companies co-created the method.

We are proud that this method was created in Brazil by great IT technicians and managers who discovered empirically better work methods.

So, when we unify the work queue, we need to address some issues, such as knowledge sharing. To do this, we use techniques like pair working and systematic people exchanges between teams, all supported by automation and creating a self-organizing environment.

To make this work, it is important to have good flow management with shared queues, balanced initiatives, and a good understanding of work-in-progress limits for the best flow efficiency.

Both Objective and Taller executed this with mastery and saw increased productivity and growth in customer and employee satisfaction.

To learn more about Objective's case, watch this video:

To learn more about Taller's case, watch this video:

Therefore, Unified Flow has a depth of topics that make this work. We offer Unified Flow training here at Synergyc to explain the practices thoroughly.

Course of Unified Flow Fundamentals

Course of Advanced Unified Flow

You can also find more details on the official Unified Flow website: www.unifiedflow.org