Map your Delivery Value Stream for Better Flow
Are features taking too long from idea to production? Are your teams busy while struggling to deliver value? Is work going back and forth within teams and between teams, with half-finished work waiting in queues? Is it hard to get insight into where time is lost and where the actual bottlenecks are? You have tried several improvements, but they had little impact?
Issues like these cannot be solved by just working harder, adding more people to the teams, or putting more focus on coordination. This will actually make things worse because these issues are systemic.
In this hands-on workshop, you will visualize your whole delivery process, from concept to cash – from a product idea or customer request to having this idea implemented and running in production. By doing so, you will discover sources of friction and waste that slow you down, and bottlenecks to focus on. You will also discover the impact of large work batches and long feedback loops and how these eat away valuable time.
Scope
You can run this workshop focused on a specific product and a specific team. Value Stream Mapping is most effective when done with developers, product owners, product management, UX, and support present. Many improvements fail because they focus only on the development team. This workshop helps you zoom out to the whole system, often finding improvements beyond development.
It is also possible to run this workshop with multiple teams to discover friction, waste, and bottlenecks that emerge from the collaboration and coordination across teams.
Benefits
This workshop will help you zoom out and find impactful improvements:
- reduce the lead time from idea to production;
- reduce rework, waiting time, and time lost on handovers and context switching;
- improve predictability;
- align teams, product, and management around the actual flow of value;
- redirect focus and effort away from local optimizations;
- prioritize improvements based on the end-to-end impact on value.
Learning objectives
After attending this workshop, participants will be able to:
- explain the end-to-end flow of value in the organization;
- explain the seven wastes in development and how to recognize them;
- identify sources of friction and waste in the delivery process;
- visualize feedback loops in the delivery process and explain what their impact is;
- facilitate a value stream mapping workshop.
Audience & prerequisites
Value Stream Mapping works best if all disciplines involved in end-to-end value delivery are represented – developers, testers, product owners, product managers, support, sales. Every role brings their own perspective, which adds to shared understanding.
No technical knowledge is required.
Practical information
- Duration: ½ or 1 day; for mapping the value stream across multiple teams, we recommend a full day
- No laptop required
- This is an in-house workshop