Mastering Workflows in the Agile Era

08/04/24

Fundamentals of Workflows

A workflow is a tool that, although it has always been used, sometimes does not have the value it deserves within our projects or activities.

But what is it exactly?

It is to capture the activities required to complete a process or task, in an orderly manner, without omitting details and in a sequential manner.

In a way it is like a recipe, for example, to carry out step A, I must first meet certain criteria or initial conditions, and after step A, and also meeting the specifications of the same, I can move on to B, C and so on.

It is important to mention that there are different types of workflows, and there is no single mold that fits them all. there are linear flows and more complex flows that may involve cycles or loops. Depending on the type of flow involved, we will find different triggers for the initiation of the process. And of course different characteristics of them.

Importance of Workflows in Modern Businesses

Nowadays it is more important than ever to have well-defined workflows, given the large amount of information that surrounds us. In addition to showing us the necessary steps, in a workflow we can also find a lot of supporting information.

In today’s world this is increasingly important as it is vital to have clear specifications of how something is done within our company, in order to resolve ambiguities and create an environment of certainty both within our company and to our customers. Having a good workflow will always be reflected outwardly as well.

Business rules defined by us to ensure that we can move to the next step when the previous one is successfully completed according to the criteria the business requires for this, are a cornerstone within our flow.

Whenever there is data transfer either between systems or between humans, the workflow exists. It’s not something we can avoid, but once we understand the benefits they bring, we won’t want to do it either.

Having well-defined workflows will open up a universe of possibilities of all kinds, continuous improvement, innovation, new opportunities, better positioning, perception, even higher profits at a given moment, and of course higher quality.

Definition and Key Workflow Components

If we could simply define the steps of a workflow we would see that although they are all different from each other, and there are many changes depending on the type of industry, customer, conditions, environment, tools and size, they all basically have 3 components:

A triggering component: What triggers or initiates our flow. Something that happens and triggers a process. If our process is linear, it will probably be an external event, for example, a customer order. If our process is a cycle, the end of the previous cycle triggers the new one, for example, investment banking processes. A trigger can also be a series of steps or criteria that must occur for the process to begin. For example, to measure the diameter of hail particles falling on the peninsula it must first rain, and hail.
Body: That is, the series of steps that must be followed to complete it. Later on we will see a small example but they are all those activities or tasks that happen in the timeline that goes from the triggering component appears until the end of our process.
End: This is the moment when we can terminate our process, as long as the validation criteria for this are met. In the example of hail, I could establish a series of measures that, when fulfilled, I could terminate the study.

Example of simple flow

An example of a simple workflow could be the following:

Suppose we are in a bakery where all our breads have the same process, except for a slight change at the end:

The flow could look like this:

Trigger: The customer requests 5 seed breads, 2 onion breads, and 3 tomato breads with olives.

Body:

Take from the left shelf of the kitchen, 200 grams of flour from the sack labeled “Flour”.
Place the flour on the central plate of the stove, after cleaning it (see cleaning workflow).
Spread it leaving a hole in the middle as shown in the diagram and add 200 ml of purified water.
Knead until you have a dough as shown in the diagram.
Add the following as appropriate:
- 50 grams of the jar of seeds if it is seed bread
- 50 grams of onion from the jar labeled “onions for bread” from the refrigerator if it is onion bread
- 50 grams of tomato-olive mix from the fridge from the jar labeled “tomato-olive mix” if it is tomato-olive bread
Bake at 200 degrees Celsius in the oven.
Verify that the bread complies with the quality criteria in aspect listed in the document “Bread Aspect Quality Criteria”.
Packing bread

As we can see, although the process is very thorough, this workflow reduces the complexity and makes the quality standards and homogeneity of our process high.

Although at first glance it may seem that having such a detailed and defined process may seem archaic and bureaucratic, having workflows actually helps us to innovate.

By having a clear picture of how we do things today we can have more clarity on steps where we could improve, or add new value as well as detect infinite opportunities.

Without this vision our innovation can remain intangible and abstract desires, because it is always necessary to be clear about where we come from to see where we are going.

There is also no doubt that having a well-defined workflow increases the quality of our product or service.

For this let’s think about the large number of companies today that have an equal user experience in any of their branches. This is a phenomenon that is growing every day and where companies are concerned that the experience a customer has in one of their branches is exactly the same as in another. This not only reduces complexity for employees, but also generates confidence in customers because they know what to expect from their visit to the facility. And this experience can get better and better all the time.

And how? A workflow also helps us to detect opportunities for continuous improvement and to be able to solve problems and incidents more quickly. And of course having it like this we could eventually even think about automating it.

Another benefit of workflows is that they help employees to self-manage. Because the process is so clear to everyone, micromanagement has no place. Each employee knows well what the purpose of the company is and how to carry out the processes. And this also makes it easier and more transparent for everyone to propose improvements.

Automation and Workflow Tools

There are many tools today that help us manage our workflows, help us visualize and understand our habits and help us through predictability.

Many of these tools use workflow automation, but how does this help us?

Workflow automation helps us to be more efficient by reducing human errors within our workflow, especially when tasks are repetitive. It helps us to perform tasks faster, thus increasing quality by helping us to carry out certain steps in the flow instead of us doing them.

To carry out a successful automation and choose the ideal tool for our company, we must do an important preliminary work: know our flow, detect areas for improvement and even decide whether we want to automate everything or only a part of it.

Even if our flow is automated, we must make it flexible enough to challenge itself, and be able to detect new steps or opportunities.

It is an important decision and an important job because if we do not do it conscientiously, in the long run it could bring us more harm than good, putting a lock on our creativity and new horizons.

Implementation of Workflows in Agile Environments

And with that last idea, we can start talking about the implementation of workflows in Agile environments.

Agile frameworks help us analyze our workflows, their different complexities, and options to have the best way to manage them.

With Agile we can decide which section of our flow can be automated, which perhaps needs to be changed, and what adds the most value to the team, the company and the customers. A win-win for everyone.

An Agile workflow is usually non-linear and helps us manage the different dependencies, criteria and stakeholders within our workflow ecosystem.

It also helps us to have clear priorities and fosters collaboration.

Among these frameworks we can find the well-known Scrum, but also others such as Crystal, XP or DDSM among others.

Just as no two workflows are the same, the value that Agile can give us with its different frameworks provides us with solutions that are not equal to each other. It is important to analyze each case, situation, environment, stakeholders and flow perspectives in order to have a proposal.