Are you closing the Distance in your Agile Journey?

An interesting phenomenon has arisen in Agile environments that could become litmus tests to determine if you are Agile.   This phenomenon is the concept of “closing the distance”.   There are three areas that closing the distance is both Agile and good for companies.  The three areas include the distances amongst employees, the distance between employees and customers, and the distance when an idea comes in until it hits the marketplace. Let’s explore each in more detail. 

Closing the Distance amongst Employees – Agile focuses a lot on individuals and interacts as one of its values.  The intent is that employees should be on teams with a common purpose bringing people closer.  Agile advocates the concept of swarming where employees collaboratively work together to get work done.  If you are a manager, Agile asks you to get closer to your employees by removing their impediments and also aligns with the practice of walking the “gemba” (walking the halls and asking if you can help employees by removing impediments and more).

Closing the Distance between Employees and Customers – In many non-Agile organizations, there are often a number of degrees of separation between employees and customers.  Agile asks that employees come face-to-face with customers in the demos to gain the precious customer feedback.  I recommend the “two degrees of customer separation” rule where no employee (including management) should be more than two degrees of separation from the customer (e.g., you to employee to customer or you directly to customer). 

Closing the Distance between Employees and Decisions – When you move to agility, you also must move the ownership of decisions more closely to those who have the most knowledge. And this is often the employees doing the actual work. This can be hard for traditional, non-agile, organization as the hierarchical structures attempt to prevent employee ownership of their work decisions. By having employees own the decision of their work, it streamlines the work leading to faster decision-making and an increase in productivity of work.   

Closing the distance between recording an idea until it hits the Marketplace – In this case distance is the lead-time (clock time between the moment the idea is recorded to when it gets released).  If you are doing Agile well, you will ensure the new idea (e.g., new requirement), assuming it is of high enough value, gets looked at immediately, and not wait until the next budget cycle.  Additionally, Agile expects that you will proactively attempt to shorten the distance from idea to release by reducing wait states and removing impediments.  

In summary, have you noticed that during your Agile journey that you have seen the distances get shorter? Are you getting closer to your colleagues and employees?  Are you getting closer to customers?  And is the lead-time distance being shortened from the moment the idea is recorded to when it gets to market?  If not, then maybe you’re not as Agile as you thought.  If you have, then you are headed in the right direction.  Could awareness of these three distances provide you a litmus test on whether you are moving in the direction of agility?

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.