There’s a simple way for talent development professionals to improve the ROI of their work: improve flow.
The concept of flow comes from lean methodology. Lean originated in manufacturing with the realization that no individual step in the manufacturing process created value. The only way to deliver value to the customer was to ship the completed product. It didn’t matter how quickly the factory could execute steps A, B, and D; if step C was slowest, then the factory couldn’t produce value faster than step C.
Lean practitioners developed the concept of “flow” to focus on how the process as a whole delivered value. Instead of trying to optimize each step individually, the goal is to optimize the flow through the system as a whole, so that finished products can be delivered to the customer faster.
This methodology transferred to knowledge work via IT. The DevOps movement recognized that working on a lot of code didn’t add value for customers until that code was deployed to production. So, IT learned to improve their deployment speeds, to the point where code is regularly changed dozens or hundreds of times a day as new features and bugfixes are turned on.
Many talent development initiatives are caught in the pre-lean mindset. Traditionally, training programs are developed as a comprehensive project that is deployed once all the work is completed. As a result, resources are divided amongst worksteams with the goal of completing every workstream at the same time.
This approach seems like good project management. But, it actually results in the slowest possible approach to delivering value. Suppose that a training project involves two deliverables: course A and course B. Let’s suppose that each of A and B would take X and Y days to complete on their own. Under the traditional project management approach, there is zero value delivered to the organization until X + Y days from the start of this initiative.
Suppose instead that all the project resources were focused exclusively on A, at which point A was launched and B began development. In that scenario, on day X the organization starts to get value from A. On day X + Y, the organization is getting value from both A and B. Notice that the organization is at the same place on day X + Y, but is getting full value of A for the entirety of Y. You can adjust the values of X, Y, and the value of each project to determine whether A or B should be worked on first, but there is no doubt that releasing one of them as soon as possible is better than releasing both when they are both done.
By improving flow, talent professionals can improve ROI. The investment remains the same under both scenarios. But, return is higher when optimizing for flow. By releasing programs quickly and efficiently, teams can maximize the value delivered to the organization. Whether you are developing training programs for customer service, leadership, or other key areas, embracing the lean approach to flow can help drive success and growth for your organization.