This post is about how I run a value stream mapping workshop as part of an Agile/Lean readiness assessment or as part of ongoing process improvements.

Value Stream Map’s are very useful for understanding how your current process works. My initial understanding came via Mary Poppendieck (books and training). Later I learned the details from the book Learning to See: Value Stream Mapping to Add Value and Eliminate MUDA by Mike Rother and John Shook; it’s all about manufacturing but the principles hold.

Workshop is ~10 people x 3 hours

For this meeting, I ask for a cross-functional group that can define the steps involved with going from concept to cash. This group may be in the 5 to 15 person range depending on the organization. Depending on how many people you have you may want to split them into multiple groups. Groups can do the same or different processes. My rule is to get to as small a group as you can and still have enough knowledge of the process.

With regard to time – 2 hours may be enough for a small company while a large bank may require the full 3 hours.

Slides used to Introduce Value Stream Mapping

Below are the slides I use to introduce the workshop. Mostly you’ll just see pictures that I use to introduce the concepts, so you gotta know this stuff well. In addition to value stream mapping, I talk about Muri, Mura, Muda and have them think about the 7 types of waste.

View more presentations from Michael Sahota.

Explain how to create a Map

Before starting the exercise, I run through creating a value stream map with them so they get a feel for how it works and agree on conventions.

As people indicate what the steps in the value stream map are, I write up each step and create the legend shown on the left. It doesn’t really matter what process you use – the point of this part is to give them a feel for identifying each of the parts. Go through a few steps until you can see they are getting the hang of it. Remember to write the time on value added and waste stickies (missing in legend).

Size matters. Queue size, that is. It is important to show how much WIP (work-in-process) there is at each step. People often know things like: we have a product roadmap with 200 features in it or 9 features waiting for development.

Some teams may not feel comfortable identifying any activities as waste. That’s OK. They may not be ready for that yet.

Mapping Exercise

It helps to pick a concrete project that is typical for the organization. Something like an average feature, typical client request or urgent defect fix. This helps people move away from a conceptual process to talk about what actually happens in real life.

It is a good idea to warn people that they may be surprised with how things actually work. Taiichi Ohno, one of the founders of Toyota Production System, joked that it is good to have a poor starting place so there are easy opportunities to show process improvement.

During the exercise, I float between the groups to answer questions and make sure things are on track. After about 20 minutes the teams are usually cooking and can proceed on their own.

Once everyone is finished, each team presents it’s value stream map to the large group. Sometimes there are minor corrections, but these are usually fine details that don’t change the big picture.

Example Value Stream Map

Below is an example (click for a large image) of a completed value stream map for funded development at a 50 person product company. In this particular case, the company noticed that 5 days of planned work actually took 15 days (with rework) plus another 10 days of waste due to communication overhead.

Special enhancements:

• Along the top we have communication waste – this is the extra time needed to manage a project in a dysfunctional process that spans 9 months.
• Below the main flow we have rework arrows. Each arrow indicates the % chance that the work item needs to return to an earlier step. As can be seen, there are multiple return trips after reaching production.

Debrief with management

At the start, I explain the overall activity and its purpose. Together with some of the original authors of the map, we walk through the steps. I stick to explaining the Value Stream Map concepts and let others explain the content. Managers are usually surprised at how long it takes to complete work.

It is especially important to clarify that we are talking about the Lean concept of system efficiency - defined as time working on product/elapsed time. This will be unrelated to other measures of efficiency at the company.

The usual follow-up on this workshop is one to specify the desired future state. Of course, all of this is a great candidate for using the A3 technique.

This post shows the A3 technique and how it is an effective management tool.

The contents of this post are my summary of THE BOOK on this subject: Managing to Learn: Using the A3 Management Process to solve problems, gain agreement, mentor and lead – by John Shook. Available via Lean Enterprise Institute and Ocapt (in Canada).

Why A3?

Over the last year, I have used A3 to solve serious problems myself as well as with clients that I am coaching. I am blown away by how effective it is. I think of it as the howitzer (big gun) of problem solving and use it for complex problems.

Root cause analysis tools are very helpful, however, do not provided a context for resolving problems. A3 is a complete process. If you are not familiar with root cause analysis, see my related blog post.

What is an A3 anyway?

As shown in the middle of the diagram below, A3 is the name for a large sheet of paper (17″ x 11″). With the A3 technique, it is filled up with useful information. Space is intentionally limited to make sure only the most relevant information is shared. At Toyota, the A3 report is used to drive company decisions from shop floor to senior management.

Let’s walk through the sections:

1. Problem – What is the problem that is causing problems? Also, give attention to the title as the summary.
2. Background – How did you decide to work on this problem? What is business problem?
3. Current Conditions – Describe the current conditions with visuals and numerical data that you have analyzed.
4. Goals/Targets – What is the desired target state? This is the place to use SMART goals.
5. Root Cause Analysis – What are the underlying causes? Use ask why five times and fishbone diagram.
6. Countermeasures – How will you reach goal state? What activities can be identified that will address root causes and how were the best ones selected?
7. Plan – What is the plan for getting there? When will the countermeasures be implemented?
8. Followup – What were the results of deploying the countermeasures? Now that there is new information, it is time to revisit the A3.

You may have noticed that this is an elaborated version of PDCA – Plan Do Check Act. This is the heartbeat of a learning organization.

It takes time and effort to complete an A3. Weeks not days. Use when appropriate.

Tips: Experts strongly recommend using real paper. Yes, you will need to re-write; editing is a good thing. A wiki is great for details, but not for thinking and summarizing.

A3 to gain agreement, mentor and lead

In this section, I want to share how the A3 technique is a powerful management tool.  Consider the following diagram:

A3 is about people working together to solve problems. The Japanese word Nemawashi is about going to the roots to reach consensus and alignment in a deep way. An A3 changes the way we work and communicate with each other. When meetings start by reviewing the parts of the A3 that have been completed, there is great focus on the remaining work. I have also seen new project participants brought up to speed very rapidly.

At Toyota, the A3 is used to do work. It is used to solve problems, make (set-based) decisions and execute plans.

Lean is famous for using pull to deliver the right part at the right time at the right place. With A3, the person driving the change effort can pull authority by working with other people and demonstrating leadership. It is chilling to see this work. I was coaching a junior analyst to put together an A3 on a production problem. When the issue escalated, the VP recognized the analyst as the expert and asked him to tell people what to do to fix the problem even though he had no formal or informal leadership role.

Finally, the A3 can be used to build a learning organization. One key aspect is to celebrate mistakes. This is also common with building an innovation culture through Improv or theatre techniques. At Toyota, it is used to develop people by helping them think for themselves to solve problems. A manager’s job is to build people and mentoring people on the A3 is a great way to do it. (Like a self-organizing team, but on an individual scale.)

I wish I had a real A3 to share, but the better ones I have are client confidential.

If you want to learn more, I urge you to buy the book or check out webinar on Managing to Learn.

Cross-training charts (also skill training charts) are a standard part of the Lean toolkit. They are used to identify limited skill sets that can lead to bottlenecks and work stoppage.  See manufacturing example.

In Scrum (and some Agile), we have the notion of cross-functional teams and place value on generalists who can go where the work is. Cross-training charts can help get you there.

Technology and Domain skills

When helping teams assess themselves, I separate technology skills (who knows a library or tool) from domain skills (who know the frazzit module). Once teams do this, the lightbulb goes off – “Oh that’s why it takes so long when we need to do work on the frazzit – only Bill knows it and he is busy with other stuff”.

On the left is a legend I have used with a couple of wiki-enabled clients to track the matrix. (Excel works too and has a nice colouring feature under conditional rules but is less visible.

Consider the example cross-training matrix below for the developers. (QA, BA important too, but they have different technologies/skills). Across the top we have the names of the developers. As you can see, on the front end, they have an OK idea how to use SpringMVC and JSTL; there are no experts, though, so it may not be clear what their frame of reference is. Sometimes people don’t know what they don’t know. Very limited experience with UXD (User eXperience Design) which may be an area for attention depending on usability goals for the product.

What about the domain matrix? Well, it looks the same but with areas of the application outlined at an appropriate level of detail. You can put the whole team (not just dev) on this one.

Lottery/Truck Factor – Are you managing your risks?

Truck factor is about how many people on your team can be hit by a truck before you can no longer effectively support a piece of software.

The cross-training chart can be used to assess how well management is managing risk. Usually what I see is “not at all” and the result shows in terms of deteriorating code quality due to departures and growth.

How to spread knowledge?

There are lots of ways. My favourite is pairing. I also like to impose a limit on publicly declared learning goals – just pick one thing to learn at a time to provide focus.

My suggestion: give your team time to share knowledge and let them decide h0w they want to do it.

Footnotes

• I keep talking to people about this so I thought I had better post on it. Most recent discussion was at a session at Agile Coach Camp in Waterloo.
• See complementary practice of Timeline and Marketplace for understanding other team members.

Here is a very short (2 min)video where Selena Delesie and I reported back on a session at Agile Coach Camp Canada. This is what a group of 10+ of us came up with.

I’ll link to the writeup when it is posted.

Thanks to everyone who was there – it was a fun, intense and valuable session for me.

Alternate Title: Organize and prioritize your personal projects.

I keep my life sane use David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) together with the Pomodoro Technique. GTD is great for managing the little stuff (like email) and Pomodoro is great for managing and prioritizing projects.

I use Index Cards for managing the Pomodoro Technique

For each activity, I use index cards (like story cards). The one in the photo has a title and two boxes – each represents a pomodoro which represents 25 minutes of uninterrupted work. In the example on the left, I am estimated that writing the blog post will take about an hour (two pomodoros).

You may be wondering what those blue and green squiggles are. Like on Agile projects, I annotate cards with themes to help with organizing them visually. On the left you can see the legend for my personal backlog. It ranges from Blue Sky (future oriented) work on my Agile Coaching Company to foundational work that has to get done or will improve my productivity.

I plan based on importance, urgency and balance

When I plan each day, I like to see some balance between themes to make sure I am looking after all my interests. Themes are an easy way to organize my backlog.

What about prioritization? Thanks to Gino Marckx for designing the Quadrants of Effectiveness Game, I use Stephen Covey’s quadrants and the Eisenhower method of prioritization. All you need to do is to scatter your cards according to Importance and Urgency. See photo below.

There is one pile of cards under CSC (hence the big box and the elastic band – like an epic). How did this work out for me? It was a good way to get started when I felt like I had too many choices. So, the next time you feel overwhelmed, perhaps, you may think of this post and take a step back to organize and prioritize your work.

What’s this business about 11?

I am using this to indicate that this is an add-on to get extra milage out of the Pomodoro Technique. See cultural reference for details on where this comes from.

Confessions

This is where I come clean on where I slack on Pomodoro Technique. I do allow interruptions since they usually have high value. I also don’t track them either. I have done so in the past, however, I don’t find it particularly critical for me. So there. So maybe my knob only goes to 1.1 …

Lyssa Adkins ran a very practical session at DeepAgile that shared several tools for team formation or for tuning up existing teams. She often uses these right at the project start since team members may know very little about one another – even if they have been working together for years. Here is a run-through of three of the exercises.

Constellation – Understanding each other through motion

I love this exercise. It provides the team members as well as the coach important information about everyone on the team. It is called constellation since everyone arranges themselves around an object on the floor (in our case a roll of tape) depending how they feel about a statement such as “I like getting results”.  People align their bodies with the statement: standing beside the object signifies strong agreement while standing far away to signifies strong disagreement. It is very powerful since people are engaging their whole bodies. To learn more, there is a full write-up on Lyssa’s blog.

Timeline – sharing our pasts

In timeline, each participant draws a timeline of their life with peaks, valleys and major life events. In turn, each person describes their timeline to the team. Team members listen and note skills or talents (on sticky notes) that stand out. These are then posted at the bottom of the timeline and reviewed as a team. This approach is about figuring out who the person is and what special perspectives they bring to move the project forward. When we did this, it helped the demo subject feel more positive about their talents. Nice.

Marketplace – sharing our talents

In marketplace we pretend we are a vendor in an open-air market place and decide what wares we have to sell. What are our special skills and talents that pertain to this project? We even get to create a banner to attract people. Under the table are things that are true for us, but may not directly relate to the project. The debrief is the same as timeline. Usually a coach will use one or the other (in the training session half of us did marketplace and half did timeline).

Below is my marketplace as an Agile coach.

(This is part of a series on DeepAgile 2010 Games Weekend).

Sadly, I did not do as good a  job capturing the the LSSC10 keynote sessions as I would have liked, but maybe I captured something you missed…

Don Reinersten really turned me off at the start of his session (The Easy Road to FLOW Goes through a Town named LEAN) which started with what felt like Kanban bashing 101. Many of his comments seemed aimed at a literal implementation of a production-like Kanban system in software – something I have not seen in practice. Despite this misdirection, there were some very strong points that I would like to highlight. See video/slides on InfoQ.

Elimination of Variability is Toxic. Great Product Development requires creativity, taking risks and encouraging failure. No errors means no learning. This reminds me of Jared Spool’s Keynote on building great products and aligns with efforts such as Enough Kanban! Use XP for Single-piece flow.

Don also introduced the Internet (TCP/IP stack) as a very different model for work execution. Again, I was a little disappointed since a lot of teams are already  implementing similar elements. e.g. Different quality of service through urgent tracks in Kanban boards. A number of people said the talk was a quick synopsis of his new book: The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development and contains ideas that will shape lean software for the next five years. These are smart people so I am going to have to get the book.

Risk, Lean Development and Profit

The second keynote was by Bob Charette.  I love the quote he shared with us about assumptions and risk:

“It’s not what you know that can hurt you; it’s what you know that ain’t so” – Will Rogers

I am reminded of the damage assumptions can bring every time I train people with my Scrum-friendly version of the XPGame. Bob points out that assumptions are risks we have accepted.

Profit = Exchange of Risk. There are three types of risk:

1. Information
2. Control
3. Time

We need to choose between these to maximize profit

Related Posts

Check out blog post: Above All, Stay Open to New Ideas, Humble to the Current Limits of Our Knowledge, and Be Ready to Innovate, Absorbing Ideas from Other Bodies of Knowledge

Mary Poppendieck gave her usual well-researched and convincing tour-de-force presenation at LSSC10 on several approaches to organizational change with a talk titled “What’s wrong with targets?”

The purpose of the whole talk is to trash Management by Objectives. See my related blog noting the damaging effects: SMART goals may not be that smart. As an alternative, Mary shares 4 effective models for organizational change.

I have heard a lot recently about the book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. It uses the metaphor of the Rider and the Elephant. I like it a lot since it lines up well with my NLP tools and understanding of the unconscious mind. Anyway the change model is very clear:

1. Direct the rider – provide clear direction and objectives.
2. Motivate the Elephant – appeal to emotions to provide energy for change.
3. Shape the path – create a supportive environment that will keep things on track.

Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results by Mike Rother is a second approach for driving change. Check out the above description in the mind map. It reminds me of the A3 technique that I have been using for the last year with great success. I’ll blog on my experiments later.

Strategy and Deming’s systems analysis + PDCA + People were the two final models to round out organizational change approaches that involve people rather than measure them. Caveat: SMART is OK for projects; not people.

Simon Roberts and Jens Korte gave a solid presentation of the how and why of team chartering. The process as they define it leads to team agreements so that there is a container for allowing the team to self-organize.  The full presentation in prezi style is here.

The importance of team agreements was recently reinforced in Jean Tabaka’s post on 78 Things I Have Learned in 6 Years of Agile Coaching (which is a great post).

(Part 3 of 5 blogs on the Scrum Gathering in Orlando)

Perhaps the most important point is that the working agreements need to come from the team and not managers or coaches. This can be tricky in the early stages of adoption where more leadership is needed.

Also of note is establishing team norms of how team members want to work and communicate together.

Harrison Owen gave a very insightful keynote speech at Scrum Gathering on OpenSpace and how we often think about management the wrong way.

(Part 2 of 5 blogs on the Scrum Gathering in Orlando)

He started with an explanation of how he has come to think about systems of people over his 75 years on the planet. There are two rules or heresies:

1. All systems are Open
2. All systems are self-organizing (at some level)

Someone asked the question of how to manage a company? Harrison replied that it’s the same as Open Space:

1. Sit in a circle
2. Use a bulletin board for what to talk about
3. Market place for agreeing when and where to talk

What isn’t in the mindmap is how he invented this.  The story goes that he had a very successful conference with speakers and sessions, but he was told that the best part was the coffee breaks. So, when faced with the problem of organizing another conference with very little time, he decided to have one that was just filled with coffee breaks.  3 Martini’s later and open space was born.

How effective is Open Space? Harrison has the view that it can create astounding results by helping people reach agreement and resolve conflicts. He has seen this consistently time after time when running Open Space.

Mike Bria blogged about the Open Space the next day.