How Value Stream Mapping can help your Agile Journey

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.

Agile Education Engine - Bringing Power to your Agile Transformation

When I look across the numerous Agile deployment efforts, I see a lower rate of success in achieving the business benefits than I would expect.  May I suggest that in order to improve the odds of achieving Agile success and gaining the business results it can bring, there are three success factors. The first is that the Agile change must be thought of an organizational level change.  The second is that the Agile change must focus on getting the mind Agile-ready.  This is emphasized in the article Are you Ready for you Agile Journey.  And the third is that in order to bridge the gap between the Agile values and principles to Agile methods and practices, people need to be well educated in ways to build more customer value, optimize the flow of work, and increase quality with feedback loops.    

The current level of Agile education tends to be limited to 2-days of training and a variety of books.  I think most people will acknowledge that 2 days of Agile training does not provide enough learning.  On the other hand, reading lots of books takes a lot of time and are often not aligned with each other.  The other challenge with some of the Agile education is that it is often focused only on implementing the mechanics.

What is missing from many Agile transformations is an Agile Education Engine that helps you truly understand and embrace Agile and helps bridge the gap between Agile Values and Principles and the Agile methods and practices.  This will help folks better understand how to understand, embrace, and implement Agile and move beyond simply following the Agile mechanics of the methods and practices.  The Agile Education Engine can help ready the mind for an effective transformation.  

One of the best Agile education engines that I have seen is the material found in the Value Flow Quality (VFQ) work-based education system.  VFQ provides a set of well-researched topics that are easily digested in the form of readings, case studies, activities, and experiments.  It provides students with the ability to study a little, then experiment a little within their own context (aka, project or team).  The benefit of the VFQ work-based learning system is that it helps people apply their newly learned skills on the job when they need them.  This bodes very well for the learners because, they can learn at their own pace and as they are trying to implement the Agile values, principles, and practices. 

Some topics that VFQ offers are: Why Change, Optimizing Flow, Feedback, Requirements, Prioritization, Trade-offs, Understanding your Customer, Delivering Early and Often, Teams, Motivation, Attacking your Queues, Work in Progress, Trade-offs, and more.  Each topic includes a number of techniques that will help you achieve the business outcomes you are looking for.  The VFQ materials will provide you with knowledge on Value Stream Mapping, Story Mapping, Cost of Delay, 6 Prisms and much more.   

In addition, VFQ really helps you get to the state of “being Agile”.  It moves you away from thinking about the mechanics.  Instead, it provides you a layer of knowledge in a critical thinking manner to ensure you apply the principles and behaviors to the practices to gain the outcomes that you want.  Finally, applying the VFQ education is also an excellent way to kick-start an Agile transformation.  This way, the Agile champions for the transformation and teams are armed with a variety of different ways to bring Agile to the organization. 

If you find yourself struggling with getting a good baseline of Agile education, then consider the Value Flow Quality (VFQ) work-based learning system.  It will help you bridge the gap between the Agile values and principles and Agile methods so that you bring the Agile mindset to bear as you start or continue your Agile journey.