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Question regarding SLE

Last post 12:37 pm September 8, 2022 by Chuck Suscheck
2 replies
05:52 pm September 3, 2022

 I don't have experience with Kanban, but id love to give it a shot with a team that I'm very confident, will help them a lot, now that I'm preparing to do the PSK1 test. 

I understand the concept of the SLE (Service Level Expectation) for the flow and the importance of watching the aging time of an item vs the SLE, so we can take action for those items.

My question is, it is a good idea to also have an SLE per stage?  It is a bad idea?  I was wondering if this is something I should take into account when defining the workflow with the team.

Thanks


07:11 pm September 3, 2022

My question is, it is a good idea to also have an SLE per stage?  It is a bad idea?

An SLE forecasts how long it should take a given item to flow from start to finish within the Scrum Team’s Workflow.

If a "stage" represents a delay before delivering value, then by definition there can be no SLE for it at all, because no service is provided nor can any be expected.

What you could do would be to establish WIP limits and pull policies between states to optimize the flow of value while assuring quality. For example, each station at which value is added may contribute to a level of Done.

My advice is to focus on such workflow policies. There's little to be gained in trying to conjure an imaginary SLE out of the ether for what is essentially a delay in delivering value. At best you'd have a go-faster stripe on a stage-gated activity.


12:37 pm September 8, 2022

If you have an SLE per stage, you may end up building inventory between stages (or starving a stage) and not focusing on the whole flow.  I wouldn't do it unless there were a really compelling reason.


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