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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Karen Martin
Read between
March 13 - September 14, 2019
A value stream is the sequence of activities an organization undertakes to deliver on a customer request. More broadly, a value stream is the sequence of activities required to design, produce, and deliver a good or service to a customer, and it includes the dual flows of information and material.
Wherever there is a request and a deliverable, there is a value stream.
Value stream maps offer a holistic view of how work flows through entire systems, and they differ from process maps in several significant ways. First, value stream maps provide an effective means to establish a strategic direction for making improvement.
Second, value stream maps provide a highly visual, full-cycle view—a storyboard—of how work progresses from a request of some sort to fulfilling that request.
visually depicting the cycle of work typically includes three components: information flow, work flow, and a summary timeline.
Third, the process of value stream mapping deepens organizational understanding about the work systems that deliver value and support the delivery of value to customers, which aids in better decision making and work design.
Fourth, the quantitative nature of value stream maps provides the foundation for data-driven, strategic decision making. Measuring overall value stream performance and identifying the barriers and process breakdowns as the work flows through the value stream is a powerful way to drive continuous improvement so that an organization is able to better meet the needs of both its customers and its internal operation.
Last, value stream maps reflect work flow as a customer experiences it versus the internal focus of typical process-level maps.
The ability to visualize non-visible work is an essential first step in gaining clarity about and consensus around how work gets done.
When organizations see the interconnectedness of various departments and processes, they make better decisions, work together in more collaborative ways, and avoid the common and costly trap of suboptimization.
Ideally, an organization seeking transformation already has a clearly defined purpose, consensus around its strategic direction, clearly defined business goals, and alignment around a limited number of improvement priorities that are needed to meet or exceed its business goals for that fiscal year.
The mapping activity results in three deliverables: a current state value stream map, a future state value stream map, and a value stream transformation plan.
The charter serves a fourfold purpose: planning, communicating, aligning, and building consensus.
socializing to communicating because it indicates that more is needed than merely e-mailing the charter around the company. Charter socialization is an important step in shaping the transformation. It lays the groundwork for successful execution of improvements and reduces the risk of obstacles that may otherwise arise months after the actual mapping activity.
walking the value stream, laying out the map, walking the value stream a second time, adding details to the map, and summarizing the map.
The first value stream walk focuses on obtaining the most basic information you need for understanding the current state: the sequence of processes that connect together to form the value stream, and the functions that perform the work.
Establishing KPIs that are actively managed is a fundamental requirement for achieving operational excellence.
