The purpose of this blog series is to show how to use Value Stream Mapping and effective Root Cause Analysis to help identify and remove delays that are inherent in any system. Each post will provide a high-level overview of the topic and provide references to explore each topic in greater detail.
In today's fast-paced business landscape, organizations strive to deliver value to their customers efficiently. However, hidden bottlenecks, handoffs and other sources of delay often hinder this process, preventing businesses from delivering value and achieving optimal results. Enter Value Stream Mapping (VSM) - a powerful tool designed to help organizations assess and optimize their value streams for faster flow and improved quality.
Value-stream mapping is a fundamental lean practice that involves diagramming a value stream and encompasses all the actions (both value-creating and non-value-creating) required to move a product or service from raw material to the customer. This includes material and information flow. It typically begins with creating a current state map to capture the actual condition of the value stream, followed by a future state map that outlines how improvements will enhance the flow.
VSM has its roots in lean manufacturing and was introduced by Charles E. Knoeppel in his 1915 book entitled Installing Efficiency Methods. In the 1950s, Toyota, via the Toyota Production System (TPS), popularized the use of VSM to shorten time-to-value in the manufacturing of its cars. One of Taichii Ono’s most notable quotes, the Father of the Toyota Production System, gets to the heart of the time-to-value mindset and the value of VSM:
“All we are doing is looking at the timeline, from the moment the customer gives us an order to the point when we collect the cash. And we are reducing that timeline by attacking waste within the processes across this timeline”
The use of VSM has moved well beyond the realm of manufacturing and is used to map and improve any workflow used in the delivery of value. Effective VSM can help companies bring new products to the market or new features to existing products faster by reducing the delays inherent in their current ways of working.
Start by identifying what value stream should be mapped to improve flow and who are the right people to be involved in this exercise to maximize its benefits. For this post, we will use a simple example by applying VSM to a fictitious team experiencing multiple delays in getting their completed work items into production. We will call this team something incredibly non-creative and non-Marvel comics based. Let us call them Team Toaster Strudel.
Map the essential steps of the value stream and establish a baseline set of metrics to identify areas of high and low value flow (i.e., delays).
Analyze metrics, identify problem steps, and identify causes of delay to prepare you for designing the future state.
Establish value stream performance objectives and then map the future state Value Stream. You will define forecasted metrics and measurable gains to determine its effectiveness.
Developing an action plan will depend on your context. If you have mapped a team level VSM, then you can add enabler stories to the team backlog to implement the future state. However, if you have identified delays at the Portfolio level within a SAFe context, then this may require identifying a Business Owner and an Epic Owner and create an Epic and associated prioritized Features to execute via the appropriate Agile Release Train(s). The goal is to target a Planning Interval (PI) to begin Feature execution of the future state value stream.
In today’s example, we will focus on Step 1 of the VSM process, Mapping the Current State. We will use a simple example from Team Toaster Strudel who is challenged by delivering working software into production every two weeks. This challenge should resonate with many since most teams have encountered this challenge or still do.
A key recommendation is to keep the current state map at a high level and ideally should not include more than 12 steps. For each step in the workflow, we will calculate the following metrics:
During a Toaster Strudel retrospective, the Scrum Master, Dorothy, had the team focus on the biggest challenge they are facing which is getting working software into the hands of their users. The team has been taking too long to get stories done and it takes the team even longer to get the completed stories into the hands of their users. Both the userbase and the Business are frustrated, and the heat is on for Team Toaster Strudel. No pun intended.
Dorothy facilitates a session with the team to review the flow of work from start to finish to understand where the delays are in their system. They use the existing states that the work moves through to create their current state value stream map. They then review the data from their Agile work management tool to determine on average how much time is spent during each step in the workflow to capture the Active Time per state. See Figure 1.