Bring me the value (stream). An introduction to value stream mapping.

Summary

• A value stream is a visual management tool that can help you align stakeholders on what the current state of an operation or process is.
• Value streams can facilitate better conversations around where to allocate resources and team members in order to better achieve business objectives.
• If you’re creating a new product or service from scratch, value streams can serve as an implementation plan to realize your goals.

Background:

When it comes to developing effective and efficient processes in your company, it can be very easy to be inundated with day-to-day firefighting of customer issues, staffing challenges, safety concerns, etc. All of which make it a challenge to take a step back and look at the broader picture of where you should be focusing you and your team’s time on.

One tool that can help set a common understanding of what your work is and where you should be focusing your effort, is a value stream map.

What’s a Value Stream?

A value stream is lean manufacturing tool, commonly attributed to the Toyota Production system, that maps out all the critical elements needed to produce a product or deliver a particular service.

Elements include the start and end of the process, critical steps and who completed them, key stakeholders involved (either doing work or consulted/informed), information flows, and key metrics for each step of the process. From there, it is also common to layer in improvement opportunities shown as cloud bursts as an additional way to bring visibility to them.

How can I construct my value stream?

To construct a value stream, you should follow the following steps.

Step 1: assemble key stakeholders involved in your workflow and process. You can certainly start putting pen to paper on your own, value streams should not be put together in a bubble. All staff should be involved, and if possible even shadowed so you can experience the process in their shoes.

Step 2: clearly define the scope statement of your process. A good scope statement has a clearly defined start and end point.

Let’s take an example within healthcare that involves patient access and getting to an appointment.

A good example might look something like the following:

• From: time patient calls in to schedule an appointment.
• To: time patient completed first appointment.

Whereas an ambiguous example that you should shy away from may look like:

• From: time patient calls in to schedule an appointment.
• To: time patient is medically cleared and/or is back to full health.

It the later of these, it could be challenging to map out everything that happens from point A to point B. If multiple appointments or services are needed, it would be wise to split them into distinct value streams.

Keeping value streams small in scope will help you more efficiently manage improvement areas without trying to boil the ocean.

Step 3: align on critical steps of your process which should include who is doing the work and what information/technology may be leveraged. You don’t need to get into the weeds here, but they should be detailed enough that anyone can have a strong grasp of what the steps are.

Step 4: define key metrics for each bucket of work. Good metrics can include items such as cycle time/time needed to complete, demand or throughput volumes, error rates, and customer satisfaction. If you’re just setting up your value stream, don’t worry too much about setting goals for the metrics just yet, that can come over time as you work to improve your operations.

Step 5: identify key improvement opportunities in the work. There are a number of ways to think about opportunities, but easiest structure is to think of the 7 wastes in a lean process:

• Errors or defects — work either becomes lost or needs to be redone.
• Over Processing — more work than necessary goes into completing the task to be done.
• Overproduction — more items/outputs are completed than needed.
• Inventory — more inventory is on hand than necessary to complete the work.
• Motion — in manufacturing people may need to move/bend more than necessary. In a virtual environment this may include moving around on an application excessively.
• Transportation — excessive movement between two points. In an in-person environment this may look like someone traveling back and forth between rooms. While in a virtual environment, this could involve toggling between multiple applications.
• Waiting — any time when a person or process needs to wait for another component to be completed before they can start their work.

What Would This Look Like in Real Life?

Let’s take an example in healthcare. In this example, we will follow a patient from the time they call in to schedule an appointment, until the time their first appointment with a physician is completed.

In this example, we may be looking at a few critical buckets of work including: scheduling the appointment, scheduling pre-appointment screening, back-end prep, and the appointment itself. Within each of these, we have a few critical steps that need to be completed in order to deliver that completed appointment.

Why Should I Use a Value Stream?

• Align stakeholders on a source of truth. By laying out your operations from end-to-end, all stakeholders have a visual sense of what is needed to complete the work. This can be especially important in fast moving or highly cross-functional organizations.
• Readily identify where the biggest areas for improvement may be located. Staff can readily see where issues or opportunities are arising and focus efforts on the bottlenecks to increase throughput.
• If you’re creating a new product or service, it serves as the foundation of your implementation plan.
• When it comes to strategic planning, a value stream can help you set and define appropriate metrics and goals, and then have a clear sense of what you need to focus on in order to realize those goals.

How do I start?

You can start building your value stream with a number of tools and applications. In a non-virtual world, it was common to gather team members in a room and put post-its on a wall. However in a virtual world, there are a number of paid tools including Visio, Lucid Chart, Miro, and Figma; and also unpaid tools such as draw.io (which was used for graphics in this post).

Questions?

Would be interested in understanding how you manage your operations currently, and if you’d find value in deploying this in your day-to-day work. If you’d like help in designing your first value stream, please give me a shout.