Value Stream Mapping Quotes

When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.

Chaos is the enemy of any organization the strives to be outstanding.

If you want engagement, you must engage.

Chaos is NOT a condition of doing business.

term Lean was coined by John Krafcik in a 1988 article based on his master’s thesis at MIT Sloan School of Management1 and then popularized in The Machine that Changed the World and Lean Thinking. Lean Thinking summarized Womack and Jones’s findings from studying how Toyota operates, an approach that was spearheaded by Taiichi Ohno, codified by Shigeo Shingo, and strongly influenced by the work of W. Edwards Deming, Joseph Juran, Henry Ford, and U.S. grocery stores. Lean Thinking framed Toyota’s

People are typically more comfortable talking with others in their own environment; being asked to come to a conference room to help a leadership-heavy team evaluate work flow can evoke understandable anxiety and make them feel like they are on a witness stand. It is much more effective to go to them.

the purpose of value stream mapping is to design a strategic improvement plan that will be executed over a period of time; it’s not designed to address problems at a detailed level.

The purpose of value stream mapping is to make strategic decisions about the future state.

In most cases, the kaizen bursts should describe the improvement generally (what), not specifically (how). Remember, value stream mapping is a strategic leadership activity that is part of a macro PDSA cycle. Designing and making specific improvements requires a series of micro PDSA cycles and heavy involvement from the front lines. You want those closest to the work designing tactical-level improvements rather than leaders who are too far from the work to determine exactly what should be done to reach a target condition.

A common behavior is to feel compelled to start improving the value stream at the micro level and focus on reducing process time. However, an interesting phenomenon occurs when teams maintain a macro perspective: process time reductions become a by-product of addressing the IT systems and barriers to flow at a macro level. The facilitator may frequently need to redirect the team to help them stay focused on the macro and eliminate the easy-to-see waste within the value stream. Going into the weeds (process-level analysis) comes later as you execute the transformation plan and define and document standard work via smaller PDSA cycles.

Companies that have the greatest success with sustained Lean transformation make an up-front commitment that eliminating work won’t result in eliminating people. It’s the work that’s non-value-adding, not the people.

If you use freed capacity to lay off staff, it’s a sign of disrespect. You can be assured that employee interest in further improvement activities will plummet and you will be unable to experience successful value stream improvement efforts in the future.

In those rare circumstances where layoffs are the only way for a business to survive (e.g., extreme market conditions), the organization should perform the reduction in force before embarking on a transformation journey that relies on creating a safe environment for the workforce to make innovative decisions.

it’s critical that an organization approach the freed capacity that is realized through process time reductions in a way that enables growth rather than viewing it as a labor reduction exercise that leads to layoffs.

Every value stream needs two to five key performance indicators (KPIs) that are tracked on a regular basis.

No matter how urgently improvement is needed, how skilled the facilitator is, or how well-intentioned the mapping team is, it’s unrealistic to expect work systems that have existed for years or even decades to be completely transformed in a matter of months. Any consultant who tells you that it’s likely, or even possible, should be shown the door. Change takes time.

We have observed that, when you ask people to describe a specific process in a value stream, there are at least four different versions: how managers believe it operates, how it’s supposed to operate (i.e., the written procedure, if one exists), how it really operates, and how it could operate.

Embracing value stream thinking is a mark of an organization that has successfully shifted from siloed thinking (what’s best for me and my team?) to holistic thinking (what’s best for the customer and the company?).

What to Do with Freed Capacity Freeing capacity is a vital way for labor-intensive organizations to increase the proportion of revenue to labor. The effort, though, should not result in layoffs. Rather, freeing capacity enables an organization to accomplish one or more of the following outcomes: Absorb additional work without increasing staff Reduce paid overtime Reduce temporary or contract staffing In-source work that’s currently outsourced Create better work/life balance by reducing hours worked Slow down and think Slow down and perform higher-quality work with less stress and higher safety Innovate; create new revenue streams Conduct continuous improvement activities Get to know your customers better (What do they really value?) Build stronger supplier relationships Coach staff to improve their critical thinking and problem-solving skills Mentor staff to create career growth opportunities Provide cross-training to create greater organizational flexibility and enhance job satisfaction Do the things you haven’t been able to get to; get caught up Build stronger interdepartmental and interdivisional relationships to improve collaboration Reduce payroll through natural attrition

If there are no metrics in place, how can you know how well the value stream is performing, let alone if it is getting better or worse?

Establishing KPIs that are actively managed is a fundamental requirement for achieving operational excellence. The key phrase is “actively managed.

you might have to counter leaders’ objections to defining such a narrow scope for the current state map. But once you get through the future state design process, everyone will see that this is a highly effective approach to accomplishing the mission at hand.

In many cases, simply getting the basics in place across an entire value stream—standardizing the work, building in quality at the source, and installing visual management—can yield significant results,

key Lean maxim that should guide your mapping team’s every step is “maximum results through minimum effort.

The exercise of distilling complex work systems to their most essential and macro-level components builds critical thinking skills and creates a more manageable means for designing improvements to an entire system

Figure 5.1 A simple value stream map for a product

Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.

The ability to visualize non-visible work is an essential first step in gaining clarity about and consensus around how work gets done.

the value stream for specific products in a search for muda. To do this we have started to map out every step—each individual action—involved in the process of physical production and order-taking for specific products. Recently we have started to think about product development as well.

Our initial objective in creating a value stream “map” identifying every action required to design, order, and make a specific product is to sort these actions into three categories: (1) those which actually create value as perceived by the customer; (2) those which create no value but are currently required by the product development, order filling, or production systems (Type One muda) and so can’t be eliminated just yet; and (3) those actions which don’t create value as perceived by the customer (Type Two muda) and so can be eliminated immediately.

Goethe asserted, “Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.

Kanban, you build a map of your work. The landscape depicted is your value stream. A value stream visually represents the flow of your work from its beginning through to its completion.

As Deming is commonly reported to have said, “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.

As you watch work flow through your value stream, you’ll see where work moves smoothly, where work is slowing down, or where work comes to a standstill. Two

plane. James Martin’s 1995 book The Great Transition

The practice of Value Stream Mapping was explicitly defined in the book Learning to See by John Shook and Mike Rother as a “tool that helps you to see and understand the flow of material and information as a product makes its way through the value stream.

The Great Transition, James Martin says, “A value stream is an end-to-end collection of activities that creates a result for a ‘customer,’ who may be the ultimate customer or an internal ‘end user’ of the value stream.”3 The scope of a value stream is the complete loop from customer need to customer satisfaction. A value stream represents a complete cybernetic control system, consisting of a customer target, a change implementation, and feedback processing.

He decried the perils of separating “the business” and IT. Martin posited that for an organization to reach peak performance in the digital future, it needed to eliminate the gap between its people and its technology—across the enterprise—creating a single cybernetic system.

Thirty years ago, James Martin was among the last major authors to point to cybernetics as a way of describing a possible future of work. (A notable exception is Jeff Sussna’s Designing Delivery.)

the facilitator’s role shifts from a coach who helps a team uncover and analyze “what is”—a left-brain activity—to a coach who inspires a team to innovate and design “what could be”—a right-brain activity. Skilled facilitators can easily shift between these two roles.

Beware leaders that want to negotiate for shorter time frames than the team feels is prudent. Most leaders have been away from the front lines for a long time and have grown out of touch with how long it takes to plan and execute well-thought-out improvements.

In terms of overall transformation plan ownership, we recommend a sole accountable party.

We find a direct link between results and the degree to which the executive sponsor remains visibly engaged.

Whereas clarity and ingenuity are required for creating current and future state maps, focus and discipline are essential for successfully executing and sustaining improvement.

We're often asked how frequently a value stream should be improved. The answer is continuously. We understand that's a tall order for many organizations, but continuous improvement is your only way out of a culture of reactive firefighting, which prevents your organization from excelling on all levels.

Learning to see and manage work from a value stream perspective is a powerful way to instill new ways of thinking into the DNA of your organization and achieve higher levels of performance.

The primary type of value stream is one in which a good or service is requested by and delivered to an external customer. Other value streams support the delivery of value; we refer to these as value-enabling or supporting value streams.

Effective planning is a significant contributor in elevating value stream mapping from a tool to a management practice that produces long-lasting transformation

Value stream mapping often demonstrates that, at a macro level, there isn't as much variation as it "feels" like there is

Top down mandates from an executive sponsor or leader over a specific functional area are the antithesis of the type of consensus building that accelerates improvement.

How can you improve workflow if you don't understand how the work is being performed today?

It represents how work flows, who does the work, and how the value stream is performing on the day the map is created.

going the gemba is an effective way to involve those who best understand what is actually happening within the value stream: the workers themselves.

seeing the value stream in action a second time allows the team to learn more deeply. Team members nearly always make additional discoveries during the second walk.

a value stream is a series of processes that connect together and transform a customer request into a good or service that's delivered to the customer, which completes the request-to-delivery cycle

Following this scientific process assures that everyone involved in making improvements is thinking critically and breaking old habits of prematurely leaping to solutions or rushing through execution for the sake of meeting a deadline.

When we ask leaders and improvement professionals what the most difficult aspect to making change is, they nearly always say, "Sustaining.

We cannot empathize this enough: sustaining improvements begins with proper planning, followed by proper execution and management.

During the three-day mapping activity, the team had numerous discussions about the role of software testing, customer involvement and responsibility, striking the right balance of iterations, and how "minimal" a minimally viable product should be.

Transformation requires fundamental changes in an organization's DNA; done well, value stream mapping can be instrumental in facilitating the necessary shifts in mindsets and behaviors.

significant time and money is wasted when organizations attempt to make improvements without a clearly defined, externally focused improvement strategy that places the customer in the center.

Value stream mapping provides a clear line of sight to the customer and the holistic means to clearly see how traditionally disparate parts of the organization are interconnected, which can serve as the catalyst for reorganizing according to value streams.

It's the process of value stream mapping rather than the maps themselves that carries the greatest power by installing transformational mindsets and behaviors into the DNA of an organization.

a typical value stream map has three key components: information flow, work flow, and a timeline.

There's a big difference between needing to change a plan because new data or new conditions warrant it and deviating from a plan because an avoidable distraction has taken away the focus of an improvement team

experiencing fewer problems and frustrations in their day-to-day work, the work force will become even more engaged in the improvement process

By comparing the defined target with actual results, the team can determine if its hypothesis was proven and make appropriate adjustments if it wasn't

we use the term countermeasure instead of solution, to aid in creating a continuous improvement culture, which begins with how people think and speak. The word solution smacks of an over-the-wall, permanent-fix mindset, which discounts the ever-changing world we work and live in.

In practice, all ideas need to be viewed as merely hypotheses; testing and evaluation of the test results must precede across-the-board adoption.

Improvements are temporary countermeasures, not permanent solutions.

Next, the team will summarize the metrics across the full value stream. We recommend, at a minimum, ... four ... summary metrics: Total Lead Time...Total Process Time ... Activity Ratio ... Rolled Percent Complete and Accurate

Freed capacity is the result of process time reduction through the elimination of wasteful activities and/or optimizing work.

While the current state briefing is often sobering, it's a helpful psychological space from which to accept the need for change and generate innovative future state thinking

designing the ability to operate with fewer customer complaints, less firefighting, and reduced interdepartmental tension brings tremendous hope to leaders and their staffs who may be feeling the pressure from an underperforming value stream.

Removing work effort may require the team to eliminate not merely the work activities, but also the need for that effort.

A common behavior is to feel compelled to start improving the value stream at the micro level and focus on reducing process time. .. redirect the team to help them stay focused on the macro and eliminate the easy-to-see waste within the value stream

It's difficult to experience high levels of success if people fear losing a paycheck due to continuous improvement.

Until holistic thinking begins to replace siloed thinking, improving the value stream will prove more challenging.

The team should be bold in its thinking and keep only those processes that are truly value-adding or absolutely necessary for the business to function.

before an improvement team can eliminate batching or reduce batch sizes, it needs to understand and eliminate the reason (root cause) for the batching

Ideally, the team designs a future state the results in lower lead time, lower process time, and higher percent complete and accurate for every process block.

ways to achieve flow . . . include shifting previously consecutive processes to parallel activities, combining tasks to reduce handoffs (which may require cross-training, resequencing, or repatterning work so that downstream recipients can so more effective work), resequencing work, and creating service-level agreements between internal suppliers and customers, to name a few.

You need to choose wisely: what are the two to five metrics that provide the best reflection of overall value stream performance?

When the team members have achieved a deep understanding of the current state and they are mapping on consecutive days, designing the future state often occurs organically- as long as people are open to challenging their existing silo-centric paradigms about how and where work should be performed

You want those closet to the work designing tactical-level improvements rather than leaders who are too far from the work to determine exactly what should be done to reach a target condition.

Depending on the organization, designing an improved state can also require thick skin, intestinal fortitude, and a hefty dose of courage.

Executing and sustaining change requires a different set of organizational behaviors than those required for planning.

You need to talk about it. Explain it. Let people ask questions.

Once you've successfully realized the iterated future state, you must have two things firmly in place to sustain it: (1) someone formally designated to monitor value stream performance to assess how it's performing, facilitate problem solving when issues arise, and lead ongoing improvement to raise the performance bar, and (2) key performance indicators to tell whether performance is on track or not (value stream management)

In mature continuous improvement organizations, value stream managers are sometimes given responsibility for profit and loss across the value stream

General Questions What are the business issues (service quality, product quality, speed, capacity, cost, morale, competitive landscape, impending regulations, etc.) we wish to address? What does the customer want? What measurable target condition(s) are we aiming for? Which process blocks add value or are necessary non-value-adding? How can we reduce delays between processes? How can we improve the quality of incoming work at each process? How can we reduce work effort and other expenses across the value stream? How can we create a more effective value stream (greater value to customers, better supplier relationships, higher sales conversion rates, better estimates-to-actuals, lower legal and compliance risk, etc.)? How will we monitor value stream performance?

Touch Points Are there redundant or unnecessary processes that can be eliminated (e.g., excessive approvals)? Are there redundant or unnecessary handoffs that can be eliminated or combined (e.g., work that can be done by a single department)? Are there processes or handoffs that need to be added?

Delays Is work being processed frequently enough? Can we reduce batch sizes or eliminate batching completely? Do we have adequate coverage and available resources to accommodate existing and expected future workloads? How can we create more capacity or reduce the load at the bottleneck?

Sequencing and Pacing Is the work sequenced and synchronized properly? Are processes being performed too early or too late in the value stream? Are key stakeholders being engaged at the proper time? Can processes be performed concurrently (in parallel)? Would staggered starts improve flow? How can we balance the workload to achieve greater flow (via combining or dividing processes)? Do we need to consider segmenting the work by work type to achieve greater flow (with rotating but designated resources for defined periods of time)?

Variation Management Is there internally produced variation (e.g., end-of-quarter sales incentives)? How can we level incoming workload along the value stream to reduce variation and achieve greater flow? Can we reduce variation in customer or internal requirements? How can necessary variation be addressed most effectively? Are there common prioritization rules in place throughout the value stream?

Technology Is redundant or unnecessary technology involved? Is the available technology fully utilized? Are the systems interconnected to optimize data movement?

Quality How can higher-quality input be received by each process in the value stream (to improve the %C&A metric)? Is there an opportunity to standardize and error proof work?

Labor Effort How can we eliminate unnecessary non-value-adding work? How can we reduce the labor effort in necessary non-value-adding work? How can we optimize value-adding work?

Value Stream Management Do policies need to be changed to enable improved performance? Are there organization departmental reporting structures that can be changed to reduce conflicting goals or align resources? Do existing performance metrics (if any) encourage desired behaviors and discourage dysfunctional behavior? What key performance indicators (KPIs) will we use to monitor value stream performance? Who will monitor the KPIs? How frequently? Who else will results be communicated to? What visual systems can be created to aid in managing and monitoring the value stream? Are the key processes within the value stream clearly defined with their own KPIs, standardized appropriately, and measured and improved regularly?

Max Weber, for example, made the mistake. He imagined that the Protestant ethic encouraged hard work and high saving, instancing Benjamin Franklin. Weber didn’t get the joke about Father Abraham and a penny saved (few have, actually). Franklin’s special gift was not working hard—which hard work, after all, the peasant planting rice does daily. His gift was innovation, at a frenetic rate, for which he was honored and required no patents for—his stove, bifocals, battery, street lighting, postal sorting shelves, the lightning rod, the flexible catheter, the glass harmonica, a map of the Gulf Stream, and the theory of electricity.