In our very first episode of The Flow Sessions, our flagship webinar series hosted by VSMC board advisor and value stream lead, Steve Pereira, we had a conversation with Value Stream Mapping legend, Karen Martin about value stream thinking. It was a very lively session, with many more questions than we were able to address in the session. In this post, I tackle the questions that lead to some top tips for value stream management practitioners.
Questions:
It’s less about the organization than the teams. Teams should:
There is an important differentiation between target and future state - future state is the long term vision, target is the next achievable state. VSM is a continuous process - think of it in terms of sprints. The teams aim for a target state (on their way to future state which, by the way, likely moves over time like a horizon), gets there and sets a backlog of items to get to their next target state and so on. It’s incremental evolution.
Start as a deputy facilitator. Leading a value stream mapping exercise on your own is pretty much impossible anyway - there’s simply too much to do. So you should always be in pairs so find someone’s who’s experienced in facilitating and ask to support them and learn on the job. Then get them to support you as you lead. Then lead and teach a newbie to support and lead. Grow the skills! In terms of mistakes; own them fix them, learn from them together.
Of course! We recommend running improvements as experiments through your existing backlog. In Module 8 (Evolving Value Streams) of our VSM Foundation course we feature a hypothesis prioritization canvas from Jeff Gothelf. To find out more about the course, go here.
I start with Little’s Law. Here’s a great explainer using tacos. Essentially, we’re talking about:
WIP = Throughput x Lead Time
In my experience, people generally try to do too much work, can’t see it or control it. Value stream management solves this by making work visible, surfacing actionable insights and making experiments measureable. Having this level of control over what we spend our time doing means we can allocate time to improvement too and see the impact of that time invested.
Totally! Isn’t that what we are here to fix? Also, what we are doing in the digital world in transforming our ways of working from large batch, project oriented methods, to small batch, product oriented models. Check out ‘From Project to Product’ for more. Using value stream management to understand our work supports this transition by:
We’d recommend our VSM Foundation course - there’s a free online version for our members. It’s an introduction to value stream management principles, practices, and tools. An introductory course taking learners through a value stream management implementation journey, it’s designed to optimize value flow and realization in digital value streams and develop individuals’ skills. Digital value streams include the software applications and services in addition to the platforms that support them e.g., cloud infrastructure or DevOps toolchains.
It considers the human, process, and technology aspects of this way of working and explores how optimizing value streams for flow and realization positively impacts organizational performance. It has these learning objectives: