Would you be surprised
to learn that many people who participate in getting an idea to market are not
very aware of all of the steps it takes to get it to the customer? People know their sliver of work well but
when asked if they know where in the full process their slice lives, it can be
a bit challenging to pin it down. One
solution is to apply Value Stream Mapping (VSM) to gain that end-to-end view.
Value Stream Mapping
is a lean method for mapping an end-to-end flow of a product or service from
the idea to the delivery to the customer.
It represents all of the activities required to transform a customer
request into a product or service. More
importantly it is a way to optimize your flow through understanding what the
state is today and then incrementally improving it over time to reduce waste
and achieve faster delivery. It is a means
to help you optimize the value being delivered to the customer by creating a
value stream that indicates what is value and what is waste.
Having applied Value
Stream Mapping a number of times, the first benefit is it makes people aware
that they are part of a much larger value stream than they thought. People start to realize that there are more
upstream and downstream steps and interdependencies than they thought. It can be quite an eye-opener for some.
The next benefit is
that it highlights the end-to-end flow of work, not just the development
work. Some folks like to highlight only
the development work and fail to realize that there are activities occurring
prior to and after development. An
example is that if you are applying a yearly planning process, an idea or
customer request may sit in the planning pipeline for upwards of
half-a-year. This is a very slow way to
get an idea to market. An end-to-end
view ensures we visualize the full picture starting with an idea or request and
then understand the amount of time it can take to get it to market.
Another benefit is
that now we visualize the end-to-end view of the work, we can identify the
value-added and non-value added steps as well as the waste (e.g., wait)
states. It becomes much easier to become
aware of the value and non-valued steps and waste when the big picture is in
front of us.
And most importantly
it provides us an opportunity to incrementally improve. Now that we are aware of the end-to-end value
stream and we know what steps are value and where is there waste, it is time to
experiment with incrementally improving the process. The primary goal of the incremental
improvement is to increase the process cycle efficiency and reduce the
lead-time from the idea or customer request to delivery.
Process cycle
efficiency is a number that represents the efficiency of your lead-time
(concept to cash). It is a summation of
all value-added time divided by that same value-added time + all of the
wait/waste time. A process efficiency example
is while the value-add steps takes 115 minutes and the full processing time
takes 2275 minutes, then you divide 115 by 2275 or 5%. The goal is to look for those incremental
areas of improvement.
How does this help in
an Agile environment? If a goal in Agile
is to get an increment of value to market quicker, then by identifying waste in
your end-to-end value stream, and removing it, can reduce the time to get that
value to market. Value Stream Mapping is
yet another tool in your Agile toolkit.
Consider learning more about Value Stream Mapping and experimenting with
it for incremental improvement.
