Functionally-siloed project teams with part-time team membership inhibit flow.

Current processes, siloed work and individual permissions introduce handoffs and delays in the flow of work.

Functional silos result in higher levels of Work-In-Progress (WIP) and hinder real-time cross-functional collaboration.

Solo development activities Introduce significant delays. Require top down work assignment. Generate lots of "status" meetings. Reduce quality. Increase WIP. Create merge headaches.

Asynchronous peer reviews lead to idle states in the flow of work.

Waterfall, phase-gated processes prevent the flow of work.

Feedback loops are too long when working in large batches in phases.

Individual work items don’t independently flow through the value stream without a larger construct (project or release).

Waterfall processes and practices result in large batches which delay the delivery of customer value and feedback.

Large batches encourage parallel work (i.e., working on multiple releases at the same time).

Batch size, risk, and cycle time are directly proportional. As batch sizes grow larger, so do the others.

Tooling is already in place to visualize each team’s workflow but is poorly used.

Work items stay in progress for weeks, months, or even years.

Visualizing the entire value stream from requirements to delivery is missing.

Work items are often tasks assigned to individuals and not units of customer-facing value.

The current usage of the workflow tool doesn’t support managing the flow of work through the value stream.

Traditional requirements practices are problematic due to requirements are often defined entirely upfront, inhibiting iterative development.

A lack of a "Source of Truth" leads to excessive information duplication across multiple documents and subsequent high maintenance overhead and inconsistencies.

The true "Voice of the Customer" is often missing. Stakeholders struggle to find necessary information.

Furthermore, the requirements are difficult to verify, easily fall out of sync with the code over time, and merely sharing documentation does not ensure a shared understanding among the team.

Relying on individual specialists for handoffs creates single points-of-failure and bottlenecks. Successful cross-functional teams need "T-Shaped" members—deep expertise in one domain plus broad complementary skills.

Current manual CM builds and producing "production ready" binaries outside the main pipeline is inefficient; binaries should be built once and promoted across environments.

Testing relies too heavily on manual processes.

The lack of technical and collaborative practices is hindering CI/CD adoption. Implementing these practices is vital for establishing the technical safety needed to deliver high-quality software in small steps.

While E2E test automation using hardware-in-the-loop has progressed, over-reliance on UI-driven E2E tests to automate all manual procedures is risky. These UI-driven tests are slow, fragile, and poor feedback mechanisms, leading to brittle tests requiring constant maintenance. Furthermore, their inability to localize errors significantly increases bug identification time and difficulty.