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Make sense of queues, work in progress, forecasting, and team capacity. These concepts explain why a busy team can still struggle to finish work.
Terms beginning with F
17 termsFixed-date item
A fixed-date item is a work item with a meaningful deadline or time window. It is a class of service that may justify different sequencing and forecasting, while still consuming the same constrained capacity.
Flow and capacity planningFlow age
Flow age applies an explicit clock to unfinished work moving through a system. It helps teams focus attention on old items instead of relying only on statistics from completed work.
Flow and capacity planningFlow balance
Flow balance describes whether arrival, WIP, and departure remain broadly aligned under defined policies. Imbalance appears as growing queues, starved stages, or repeated bursts of completed work.
Flow and capacity planningFlow constraint
A flow constraint is a limiting policy, capability, dependency, or resource that reduces effective movement. A constraint can be structural or temporary and may move after an intervention.
Flow and capacity planningFlow control
Flow control includes WIP limits, pull criteria, service classes, queue visibility, and feedback about age and completion. Its purpose is to prevent uncontrolled accumulation while preserving a safe path for work.
Flow and capacity planningFlow distribution
Flow distribution is the spread of elapsed times for work items moving through a delivery process. It shows how often work finishes within different time ranges instead of reducing every item to one average.
Flow and capacity planningFlow efficiency
Flow efficiency is the share of elapsed delivery time spent on active work rather than waiting, handoffs, or queues. It helps teams see whether a slow result comes from implementation effort or from delays around the work.
Flow and capacity planningFlow load
Flow load is the volume of work placed on a workflow, including active and waiting items when the boundary is stated. It describes pressure on the system rather than effort or business value.
Flow and capacity planningFlow metrics
Flow metrics include cycle time, throughput, work item age, queue time, and flow efficiency. Together they describe how work behaves rather than reducing engineering to one activity count.
Flow and capacity planningFlow policy
A flow policy defines the behavior expected at a workflow boundary. It may specify entry criteria, WIP limits, service class handling, blocked work, and completion evidence.
Flow and capacity planningFlow predictability
Flow predictability is the degree to which completed work matches a defined forecast, range, or service expectation over repeated observations. It concerns consistency, not simply speed.
Flow and capacity planningFlow rate
Flow rate is the count of work items that pass a chosen completion boundary per unit of time. It is a throughput measure whose meaning depends on the item population and finish event.
Flow and capacity planningFlow review
A flow review is a structured inspection of work movement, waiting, WIP, and delivery outcomes. Its purpose is to learn where the system is constrained and agree on a small change to test.
Flow and capacity planningFlow time
Flow time is the elapsed interval between a work item's entry into a measured workflow and its completion. It includes active processing and waiting inside the selected boundaries.
Flow and capacity planningForecast confidence
Forecast confidence expresses how strongly available evidence supports a predicted delivery outcome. It should reflect variation, sample quality, work definition, and changes that could invalidate historical patterns.
Flow and capacity planningForecast horizon
A forecast horizon is the interval into the future for which a delivery prediction is intended to be useful. Its length depends on historical variation, work definition, system change, and the decision being supported.
Flow and capacity planningForecast range
Forecast range is a concept used in software delivery planning to describe a condition, relationship, estimate, or decision about engineering work.
Flow and capacity planning