Value Stream Mapping Quotes

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

“In mature continuous improvement organizations, value stream managers are sometimes given responsibility for profit and loss across the value stream”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

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

“We cannot empathize this enough: sustaining improvements begins with proper planning, followed by proper execution and management.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“When we ask leaders and improvement professionals what the most difficult aspect to making change is, they nearly always say, "Sustaining.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

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

“In the spirit of respect for people, and as a means to facilitate plan execution, workers who are part of the process or those who will be affected by the improvements must also be aware of the mapping activity and the plan for transformation.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“You need to talk about it. Explain it. Let people ask questions.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“Whereas clarity and ingenuity are required for creating current and future state maps, focus and discipline are essential for successfully executing and sustaining improvement.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“Executing and sustaining change requires a different set of organizational behaviors than those required for planning.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“We find a direct link between results and the degree to which the executive sponsor remains visibly engaged.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“It bears repeating: in our experience, the plan review meetings are a key success factor in value stream transformation.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“In terms of overall transformation plan ownership, we recommend a sole accountable party.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

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

“Improvements are temporary countermeasures, not permanent solutions.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

“In practice, all ideas need to be viewed as merely hypotheses; testing and evaluation of the test results must precede across-the-board adoption.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

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

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

“experiencing fewer problems and frustrations in their day-to-day work, the work force will become even more engaged in the improvement process”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

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

“Depending on the organization, designing an improved state can also require thick skin, intestinal fortitude, and a hefty dose of courage.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

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

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

“one advantage of working backward is that the reverse perspective can sometimes reveal opportunities and problem-solving strategies that taking the usual course may not uncover.”
― Karen Martin, Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation