Value Stream Mapping Quotes

“When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.”
― Karen Martin, The Outstanding Organization: Generate Business Results by Eliminating Chaos and Building the Foundation for Everyday Excellence

“Chaos is the enemy of any organization the strives to be outstanding.”
― Karen Martin, The Outstanding Organization: Generate Business Results by Eliminating Chaos and Building the Foundation for Everyday Excellence

“If you want engagement, you must engage.”
― Karen Martin, The Outstanding Organization: Generate Business Results by Eliminating Chaos and Building the Foundation for Everyday Excellence

“Chaos is NOT a condition of doing business.”
― Karen Martin, The Outstanding Organization: Generate Business Results by Eliminating Chaos and Building the Foundation for Everyday Excellence

“Rather than viewing value stream mapping as just a toll to reduce operational waste, the broader use of value stream mapping as a methodology to transform leadership thinking, define strategy and priorities, and assure that customers are receiving high levels of value is where value stream mapping earns its brightest stripes.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

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

“The inclination to jump into the weeds and design micro-level improvements before the entire work system - the macro picture- is fully understood, is a key contributor to suboptimization.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“Suboptimization occurs when you make an improvement to one component of a system while ignoring the effects of that change on the other components. A seemingly important improvement could cause the overall work system to perform more poorly.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

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

“The visual nature of value stream maps enables consensus-building conversations across the organization, from the front lines to senior leaders.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“the most powerful metric we've seen for analyzing processes in office, service, and knowledge work environments: percent complete and accurate (%C&A)”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“Failure to involve leadership, employ cross-functional teams, and include relevant metrics, for example, often results in subpar future state designs that collect dust.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

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

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

“Very few things are unmanageable once they are distilled to their basic components.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

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

“a typical value stream map has three key components: information flow, work flow, and a timeline.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“Companies that reorganize without understanding their value streams may experience short-term improvement, but longer-term gains are far more likely by using value stream thinking to shape the reorganization.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“Effective planning is a significant contributor in elevating value stream mapping from a tool to a management practice that produces long-lasting transformation”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation