Value Stream Mapping Quotes

“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.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“Value stream mapping often demonstrates that, at a macro level, there isn't as much variation as it "feels" like there is”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“You're a step ahead when you conclude the mapping activity with leaders from across the organization, show them how the team intends to make process, and obtain their public commitment to support the plan.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“Organizations that skip this vital step of socializing the charter with leadership ... often have to navigate through and around obstacles that would otherwise not exist”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“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.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“How can you improve workflow if you don't understand how the work is being performed today?”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“It represents how work flows, who does the work, and how the value stream is performing on the day the map is created.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“going the gemba is an effective way to involve those who best understand what is actually happening within the value stream: the workers themselves.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“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.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“There are several advantages to walking the value stream in the reverse order from how work typically flows.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“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”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“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”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“the value stream map looks at the high level activities that transform a request into some sort of deliverable . . . 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”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“To aid in targeting the right level of information, we aim for 5 to 15 serial process blocks”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“The purpose of the second value stream walk is for the team to gain a deeper understanding about how the value stream currently performs and identify significant barriers to flow.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“We use three metrics to evaluate the current state of 98 percent of the office and service value streams we've encountered: process time, lead time, and percent complete and accurate.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“Freed capacity is the result of process time reduction through the elimination of wasteful activities and/or optimizing work.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“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”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“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.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“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.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“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?)”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“Value stream improvement requires strong team-player mindsets and mapping team members who are comfortable designing for the greater good.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“Removing work effort may require the team to eliminate not merely the work activities, but also the need for that effort.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“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”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“It's difficult to experience high levels of success if people fear losing a paycheck due to continuous improvement.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“Until holistic thinking begins to replace siloed thinking, improving the value stream will prove more challenging.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“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.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“before an improvement team can eliminate batching or reduce batch sizes, it needs to understand and eliminate the reason (root cause) for the batching”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“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.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“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.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation