Planning for Flow
The counterintuitive truth is that a smooth, slightly underloaded system ships more than a thrashed, fully loaded one — because flow beats speed every time.
From Goldratt's The Goal to Kim's The Phoenix Project, from Ohno's Kanban to the 7 Wastes, this talk traces the lineage of modern project delivery and distill it into practical, actionable principles. We'll cover why categorizing and prioritizing Work (as an entity) is non-negotiable, why idle resources beat maximized capacity, and how measuring Velocity and Overhead can transform a stuttering trickle into a smooth-flowing river. We'll finish where the industry is right now — with AI having inverted our internal processes — and how its many pitfalls can be subverted and turned instead into accelerators.
Pt. 1: The Science (15 min): Flow, Goldratt, Ohno. Why maximized capacity kills throughput. Identifying and isolating your constraint. Splitting Work into isolated Epics. Respecting Overhead.
Pt. 2: Reading the Signals (15 min): Examples of Gantt charts and other signals that start expressing constraints. Allowing slack in Work capacity to deal with the unknown.
Pt 3: Protecting the Constraint (30 min): Back to Ohno — how constrained Work should never enter the system unmanaged. Structuring the Kanban so it can't. Four work types as separate Epics: Business Projects, Internal Projects, Changes, Unplanned Work. Each with its own lane, its own flow rules, its own capacity allocation, and how to swap capacities to deal with the unknown.
Pt 4: Optimization (15 min) Isolating constraints (protect Bruce!). Velocity measurement. Overhead identification. How AI fits — and where it creates new constraints if you're not watching.
Grant Shepert
