I doubt it will surprise you that most of us are not working in a self-sustaining team that can provide everything it needs. Instead, we frequently need to reach out across team and department boundaries for help in completing our work. We work in complex systems filled with people and technology that inject unexpected concerns and risk. We work in the land of handoffs and dependencies. If you are a student of flow, you learn quickly that it’s these handoffs and dependencies that have exponential, and undesirable, impacts on the time work takes to complete. It becomes clear that, in order to optimize how work flows through our systems, we have to address these touchpoints.

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