Hello! I'm Cory Foy, and
in this Faster Fridays video I wanted to walk through
a technique known as Value Stream Mapping. This is a
powerful technique from Lean Manufacturing which allows you
to understand not just your process, but the delays
queues and time spent in them to find out
what's really slowing you down.
In the upper left hand you can see a Value Stream Map I did
for a client many years ago. This was obviously a
rough sketch, but we were able to do it quickly.
But what is a Value Stream Map? At its core
it is a way of visualizing the flow of work
in a system. But the power comes from
mapping your actual process, not how you want
it to - or wish it did - work.
Our map begins at an entry point into the
system. Ideally this is the very beginning.
Perhaps where an idea first gets introduced.
We then walk through all of the steps until it leaves
our system, or we get the value we need, in this case
shipping software. It's possible for this
to go even further. For example, a hospital's
value stream may not end when a patient is discharged.
They may want to track post-discharge steps,
follow up appointments, or even readmissions.
Once we have our process, we then look at
the processing time in each step. In this
case we're dealing with people - not machines - so design
may take 2 days of work, but it takes the designers
two weeks to devote two full days towards the design.
Likewise, the development team may spend
two full weeks developing, but it takes them twelve weeks
to get those two weeks - either because of meetings,
context switching, escalations or other work. Finally,
we ship it, which is a full day deployment, but
our piece is only one hour of.
Now that we have our processing time, we need to look at
our queues, or the places work sits while it's waiting
to move downstream. It's very rare to have
perfect efficiency, so in this case we see
that once an idea comes in, it takes on average
a week for design to start, two weeks for development
to start once design is done, and an average of three weeks
for it to be deployed due to the organization's six week
deployment cycles. So to close this out,
our processing time - calculated by adding up
just the time spent working, was 97 hours
or about 2.5 weeks of work to go
from idea to shipping. It takes
688 hours to actually get it out the door
about 17 weeks, resulting in a
14% efficiency. But, is that real?
That seems wasteful, doesn't it?
So let's go back and look at that client diagram
and actually sketch it out to see how it was.
In this case, we start with the
request coming in. It then goes through
Opportunity Assessment, some analysis, a review,
of the analysis, some product team analysis,
they generate high level requirements - that goes through a review
then the original requesting stakeholder has a
approval process. Then the requirements themselves get
finished up, it goes through a design stage, the design
gets approved. It goes through architecture submission and
the architecture gets approved. And then...
we can kick off the project! Yes!
We haven't even started developing yet!
But now what we want to do is map out the processing time
and queues in between them. These came from
the actual teams and executives, and represented
average waiting times.
But even this doesn't tell the entire story, because
in at least three places we can get rework.
For example
at the first review stage, an average of 20%
of requests get kicked back to Opportunity
Analysis once. In the second review, work
gets kicked back to Product Analysis
50% of the time! When we mapped all this out
we found it was 286 hours of
work over 1592 hours
or, 7 weeks of work, but
10 months to get those 7 weeks!
So when we talk about wanting to go faster, we didn't need
to look at engineering. We could drastically improve
the responsiveness of the organization simply by
reducing the queueing time between these steps
without even having to remove any of them.
So if you want to try this yourself, start with
your own process. Map out the time inside steps,
then the time in-between steps.
Calculate your times, recover from your heart attack,
and then work on clearing those bottlenecks.
Your entire organization will thank you! And if you get stuck
or need any help, don't hesitate to reach out at
hello at coryfoy dot com. I regularly perform
assessments and VSMs for clients in a wide variety of
industries and governments, and would be more than happy to help yours.
Until next time, here's to tracking down your delays!