FLOWCON 2025

From Wild Bets to Solid Forecasts: Mastering Predictability

Tired of unreliable forecasts and missed deadlines? This workshop will show how managing the age of your WIP can stabilize cycle times and improve delivery predictability. Together, we'll tackle common forecasting pitfalls and uncover actionable ways to make your work more predictable.

Sum up the session in only 1 sentence
In this workshop, we’ll explore how controlling the age of work in progress can help teams improve predictability, avoid delays, and make more reliable forecasts.

What are the 3 top takeaways from your session or workshop?
Key Takeaways from My Workshop: 1. Controlling the age of work in progress (WIP) is the simplest, most effective way to improve predictability. By keeping WIP age in check, teams can reduce cycle times and avoid delays. 2. Predictability starts with improving single-item forecasting. Instead of guessing delivery dates for large groups of work, focus on accurately forecasting one item at a time. 3. Stable cycle times make forecasting easier and more reliable — for both single items and larger projects. By managing WIP age and stabilizing cycle times, teams can confidently make both short-term and long-term delivery predictions.

Impact Mapping Workshop

"Impact mapping is a lightweight, collaborative planning technique for teams that want to make a big impact with software products. It is based on user interaction design, outcome-driven planning and mind mapping. Impact maps help delivery teams and stakeholders visualise roadmaps, explain how deliverables connect to user needs and communicate how user outcomes relate to higher-level organisational goals." (source: https://www.impactmapping.org/)

Impact Mapping is a unique technique (described in a book by Gojko Adzic) which enables every organisation or team facing a new problem, a new challenge to not only find unexpected ideas but also to make sure that these ideas address those challenges instead of fulfilling other interests.
By following the steps, Impact Mapping helps find ways to experiment, innovate, and compare possible ideas by focusing on the outcome rather than the output. It gives the group the means to verify the progress the whole time - to fail fast or stop investing because they have reached their goal.

In this workshop, we will discuss and map a fictive problem. At the end of the workshop, you will know how the technique works and when to use it, how much fun such Impact Mapping can be and how creative people are when the only constraint is time :)

Sum up the session in only 1 sentence
We will learn how to analyse and manage to prove that our assumptions about the users' problems are correct before investing a lot of work in fixing the wrong problem.

What are the 3 top takeaways from your session or workshop?
1. The method is easy. The key is asking the right questions outside of our silo. 2. The right questions and the right metrics. 3. Assumptions are hindering, experiments are enabling.