Syllabus
Description of Course
The Flow Thinking (FT-A1) advanced course explores the different concepts of flow (individual, collective, societal) and presents various contextual definitions for flow. As flow relates to value being delivered to the customer, the concept of customer 1st will be revisited in more detail compared to what was presented in The Flow System Foundations (FS-1) course (FS-1).
This course introduces different concepts that potentially impact the flow of value being delivered to the customer while also introducing participants to different scaling, visualization, and mapping techniques. How flow can be measured or evaluated is also included in this advanced course.
We look at queue blindness, Design in Process Inventory (DIP), and Product Development Inventory. We explore how value streams and value chains work, and how organizational design for flow efficiency is different to process or resource efficiency.
This course also investigates the value of variability in opposition to established Lean Thinking. Participants will learn the benefits of managing queues rather than timelines and will be introduced to constraint management techniques. The topics of cadence, synchronization, flow control, batch sizing, economics, and decentralized control will be introduced to participants.
Duration of Training
Flow Thinking (FT-A1) advanced course requires 16 hours of training and can be taken as a two-day in-person training session, an online live virtual class, or as an asynchronous self-paced online training using The Flow System’s learning management system (LMS). This course can be taught publicly or privately to any organization.
Participants must complete the training before receiving a code allowing them to take the Flow Thinking (FT-A1) advanced level assessment for accreditation. The fee for the assessment is included in the course fee for training attendees.
Participants who attend the training will have two attempts at the Flow Thinking (FT-A1) advanced Level assessment. Participants who wish to forgo the training and jump straight to the assessment may do so but must first buy a code and will only have one attempt as opposed to two for people taking the training. You can buy a code below by clicking Take Assessment.
Objectives of Course
This course is an advanced course in which participants should have an understanding of The Flow System Foundations (FS-1) and must have successfully obtained accreditation in The Flow System Foundations. After successfully completing this course participants should be able to:
- Define how flow should be defined for their organization.
- Explain different contextual definitions of flow.
- Explain Value Streams and Value Chains and how they are designed.
- Design teams for flow efficiency.
- Identify how flow can benefit the participant’s customer(s).
- Identify queues and describe why they are hidden.
- Describe how to manage queues and achieve effective timelines.
- Define effective constraints.
- Describe how to manage constraints.
- Describe how to utilize variability to enable flow.
- Describe cadence, synchronization, and flow control.
- Explain how to measure the economics of flow.
- Describe how flow works with agile in the workplace.
- Apply different visualization and mapping techniques.
- Exhibit an ability to utilize various techniques to measure flow.