What is a Value Stream?

Successful projects achieve their goals when the people inside and outside of the team understand the process that results in value delivery, and they organize around those activities that (from the customer's perspective) add value to the specific goals of a project. This is known as a Value Stream.

Each Value Stream is a series of steps that when completed, provides value to internal or external customers. Each Value Stream begins with a triggering event, such as the placement of an order or a request for new feature, and it ends when the intended value has been delivered(such as a finished product or deployment).

Even if some of those activities do seem inherently useful to the overall business for some reason (such as improvement of a developer's skillset), if the activities do not directly deliver value to the customer or product at hand, those activities are not considered adding value, but rather, as waste to the project.

Why Use Value Stream Maps?

Organizing portfolios of work around their respective Value Streams helps to eliminate waste but because there are often intersections between production portfolios, it also helps to start by graphically representing the steps to delivering value using a Value Stream Map.

A Value Stream Map is a flowchart that illustrates the path of people, systems, flow of resources, and the time that is required to deliver value to the customer. These are mapped with each step identified as adding or not adding value, from the customer's perspective.

Understanding the Value Stream helps to eliminate several kinds of waste: partially completed work, unnecessary processes, extra or unrequested features, multitasking between projects or unrelated tasks, lag time, project defects, and unnecessary handoffs or other inefficiencies in collaboration efforts.

By developing a Value Stream Map and graphically representing workflows, it is easier for your team to understand the process and see potential problems – and it helps decision-makers understand where are the easiest points of change to solve some of those problems.

A graphic Value Stream Map makes it easier to organize collective action; it ensures that everyone understands a plan for improvement, and it helps each team member to understand their own part in the process, which builds a sense of individual ownership as well as a responsibility to the whole team.

Graphically Represent the Steps

The process of identifying and understanding the various flows of value is the starting point for improving efficiency and performance.

The entire time from the triggering event through to the delivery of value is called the "lead-time." The purpose of mapping the Value Stream is to identify and address delays and non-value-adding activities, which is the surest way to shorten a project's lead-time sustainably. Ideally, every action works together in a stream to continuously add value to a finished product.

A value stream map illustrates and simplifies complex systems so that it is easier to analyze the production process and locate opportunities for improvement.

Because it can be time-and resource consuming to complete a Value Stream Map, here are some questions to help you define which processes should be mapped:

• What are the larger objectives that differentiate the business in the market?
• What are the larger subsystems or components? And: What key system operational capacities are being enabled?
• What products, systems, services, applications, or solutions does the organization sell?
• What initiatives currently have a significant number of developers and testers working together?
• How do external customers perceive or characterize the value they receive?
• What key business processes are enhanced or enabled?
• What critical Nonfunctional Requirements are being implemented or enhanced?
• What internal departments are supported, and what internal or external customers do those departments serve? And: How do those departments describe the value they receive?
• What key process, cost, Key Performance Indicators, or business improvement efforts are targeted?

You can create a demonstration Value Stream Map by using something the team has already created and which has been shown to deliver value – a minimal marketable feature.

Define the Scope of Mapping

A Value Stream Map can encompass the entire organization if it's allowed to be, so start by defining the parameters of the work you're going to do:

• Define the product or product family to be improved, with leadership's buy-in of course.
• Identify what constitutes "value" (from the customer's perspective, including the pace or speed at which the customer expects value to be delivered.)
• Determine the what is the specific problem you would like to solve, with the customer's perspective of value in mind.
• Define the scope of your mapping; many Value Streams cross operational departments, and the mapping can grow quite large if it ends up capturing more of the process than is necessary. Set the parameters of your mapping: are you mapping an entire production chain? Or are you mapping just one problematic part of a Value Stream?

Create a timeline of the process.

• A simple timeline can help you start to record the process and monitor inventory levels at each step. Start by drawing a box for each of these steps in left-to-right sequential order, and draw a straight arrow to connect each of the boxes.
• Next, estimate the time it took to do the work for each step, and how much time elapsed between the completion of a step and the start of the next. Draw lines under the boxes to represent the work and wait-times. The simple Value Stream Map shows the amount of time spent on work, as well as waiting. It took a total of 72 days to complete the process, and of that time, 37 days or 51% of the time was spent waiting.

Graphic Representation

Using your timeline, you can then create a more complete map of the process, which includes a visual representation of the process structure. Agile Value Stream Mapping uses symbols in categories of process, material, information, and general, to represent various aspects of the process, although these symbols aren't necessarily standardized or the only ones you can use. If making up other symbols makes sense, then you should do so. Here are some commonly used symbols:

Process Symbols

Material Symbols

Information Symbols

General Symbols

Creating the Map

The purpose of the value stream map is to document each significant step that results in producing value for the customer:

• Start the mapping process by recalling all of the steps from the start of your process to the finish. The best way to do this is to physically "walk" with the product through all of the steps, from the trigger to delivery. (It's important to experience all of the steps yourself, because employees may be so used to performing the steps that they forget to report some.)
• As you "walk" with the product, record process data. Process data such as inventory levels and type, number of personnel and available shift time, machine or process uptime and downtime, cycle time, change time, etc. all offers valuable clues to the flow of your Value Stream. Use the data boxes to record this information on the Value Stream Map.
• Use the data boxes to evaluate whether and to what degree each process step is:
  • Valuable (to the customer)
  • Capable (of delivering consistently high quality)
  • Available (when it's needed)
  • Adequate (to meet customer demands)
  • Flexible (to meet demands in another product family quickly and inexpensively)
• It's vital to understand the flow of information or communication in the value stream, and the movements of product and information between process steps is also a large part of the end delivery of value. Note whether the movements of product information are:
  • Stagnant or Flowing – ideally, a Value Stream never stops flowing, and the product never stops moving.
  • Pushing or Pulling – In the ideal stream, only the trigger is required to initiate actions; however, in reality, there are sometimes disconnects in the process, which is dealt with by either pushing information to the next step, or by pulling information from the previous step.
  • Level or Erratic – showing how smoothly the process has been evened out for more efficiency, or whether there are parts of the process which are overburdened or wasteful.
  • The communication touch points to map include how customers order the product, how suppliers are contacted, and how we make sure customers get what they expected.
• Account for inventory. Failure to account for on-hand inventory that may be scattered throughout the process can result in overproduction, which is a major cause of waste.

Results: Graphically Represent the Steps

• The Value Stream Map reveals where delays in production occurs, but does not feature any details about why those delays occur, leaving room for the team to discover which delays are wasteful and which are necessary for the project.
  • Most of the time, a Value Stream crosses several boundaries: between departments, divisions, and sometimes even across organizations with subcontracting. Enterprises as a whole are not necessarily organized to accommodate an individual Value Stream, or even a portfolio of work; most of the time, they have been organized in a de facto sort of way based on the history of acquisitions or other growth, or based on functional conveniences such as geography, centralization, or by departments.
  • The Value Stream Map helps indicate how to organize all of the people and assets across the organization into teams and sub-teams in order to create maximum efficiency. This organization within the Value Stream is called an Agile Release Train (A.R.T.) The concept of the Agile Release Train originated from the Scaled Agile Institute in order to help implement Value Streams for Technology teams.

It is important to take a globalized, systems-approach to understanding how the various parts of the Value Stream need to work together. Focusing on organizing an Agile Release Train around the default organizational structure might result in a positive localized outcome, but could easily have the unintended result of creating dysfunction in another part of the Value Stream.

Reflect on the Value Stream Map that you've created to see things that might not have been clear at first. Use information in the data boxes and timeline to find waste such as excess inventory, too much downtime, long process times or setup times, and quality problems that result in re-work.

Tips for reviewing your Value Stream Map:

• At least one team member needs to "Walk" the entire Value Stream, and experience the process as directly as possible – don't just rely on reports.
• Sketch the Value Stream Map in its entirety, by hand first. Capture everything you can, and organize using mapping software later.
• Walk through more than once, perhaps starting with a quick overview and then a more detailed walkthrough. Try a reverse walkthrough, this might also uncover more details.
• Keep asking why, to uncover the underlying reasons for each part of the process. In Lean Six Sigma, this technique is called The Five Why's. The idea is to simply ask why something is done (or done in a certain way), and to keep asking why until the ultimate reason is discovered.
• It is common to have Software Development Value Stream Maps that intersect with your main Value Stream for delivery (as described above). The Software Development Value Stream Maps can illustrate a more granular look at all the people, systems, processes, needed to deliver software efficiently and effectively.