The importance of knowing your workflow steps

I recently had a conversation with a team I was helping with their workflow. Upon explaining the need to define policies for when work begins and ends, and policies for when it transitions between different stages I was asked why they would ever need more stages than simply [To Do] -> [In Progress] -> [Done]

Luckily the person questioning was happy to debate the question and to give me a chance to explain. To aid my explanation I produced the following diagram. I’ve come across this example in more than one book and I’ve found it useful in explaining the concept in the past.

Consider a scenario where someone (not me!) is consistently late for work in the morning and they are trying to improve their morning routine so that they can leave their house on time and be able to start their car drive to work before 8:30am.  Let’s say they explore the activities that need to happen between waking up and reaching their car. I offer two options in the diagram. The first one is similar to having a simple workflow of [To Do] -> [In Progress] -> [Done]. That is - there is a clear policy of when you move from step 1 to step 2 (alarm goes off) and there is a clear policy of when you move from step 2 to the final step 3 (I am in my car). Suppose you want to improve this process after being consistently late for the last 2 weeks. How would you go about it?
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I know what I would do (eg break down into activities) and so I have also presented a possible morning routine with all the steps involved that one might need to get ready. Now I have multiple milestones, I can monitor how my “getting ready” is progressing and I can adapt accordingly to make sure I catch up on my schedule if I am behind. A simple example in case I am already running late by step 4 could be that instead of making an omelette for breakfast I might use some boiled eggs from the day before or I could make cereal and this will save me some time and I can be back on track. Without this level of detail it becomes impossible to make adjustments that can get you back on track and it’s difficult to analyse which steps might regularly cause you the delay.
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It should be fairly easy to apply the same principles to other flows of work.The reasons for more visibility of the work flow and transition policies are the same as in this simple example. The benefits of applying these principles can be huge depending on your specific circumstances. It is therefor rather surprising that many teams and delivery programmes choose to ignore this level of detail.

Are you interested in how this principle can help your own workflow? Get in touch for a obligation chat.