Flight Levels

Lean Thinking and the path to business agility

A flow-based sys­tem es­tab­lish­es in­no­va­tion speed and max­i­mum flow of busi­ness val­ues.
Such a sys­tem al­lows to de­tect op­por­tu­ni­ties and threats in the busi­ness and to re­act faster.

Every organisation/​company needs a Val­ue Stream Man­age­ment that ap­plies Lean Think­ing prin­ci­ples:

1. Pre­cise­ly de­fine the val­ue for each product/​solution
2. Iden­ti­fy the val­ue stream for each product/​solution
3. Let the val­ue stream flow with­out interruptions
4. Let the cus­tomer pull the val­ue from the man­u­fac­tur­er (ex­ist­ing so­lu­tion), or the man­u­fac­tur­er in­no­vates and the cus­tomer val­i­dates (in­no­va­tion)
5. Pur­sue perfection

We view the organisation/​company as a sys­tem of 3 lev­els (Flight Lev­els) with linked and de­pen­dent goals:

• Flight Lev­el 1 (FL1): De­vel­op­ment and op­er­a­tions — Teams and in­di­vid­u­als who get the job done, develop/​maintain the prod­uct, and help customers.
• Flight Lev­el 3 (FL3): Strat­e­gy — The North Star, which pro­vides di­rec­tion and priority.
• Flight Lev­el 2 (FL2): Co­or­di­na­tion — The link be­tween FL1 and FL3. 
  • Co­or­di­na­tion across val­ue streams (port­fo­lio)
  • Co­or­di­na­tion with­in val­ue streams (be­tween teams).

Flight Lev­els is a think­ing mod­el that shows a sys­tems ar­chi­tec­ture con­nect­ing all (ag­ile) teams …

by means of 5 ac­tiv­i­ties (vi­su­al­ize sit­u­a­tion, cre­ate fo­cus, es­tab­lish ag­ile in­ter­ac­tions, mea­sure progress, ini­tial­ize improvements) …

on 3 flight lev­els.

Source: Flight Lev­els — A short in­tro­duc­tion (S. Kalte­neck­er, K. Leopold, d.punkt Verlag)

Introduction