“They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap.”
A few days ago, I shared Bob Somer's post and mentioned my passion for Value Stream Mapping (VSM) and the great benefits and insights that can arise from getting a cross-functional team into a room to examine a process, assess it, and envision what the future process should look like. I received a positive resonance which has led to this post.
VSM is a great tool yet, inevitably, the process triggers a lot of discussion especially in the area centred around: What is Business Value?
Classical Value Stream Mapping has us looking at the process from the customer’s perspective. Value is what the customer expects and pays for. This is unarguably the correct principal perspective, but experience has shown, that it’s not the whole story.
Investors in the company have a different definition of value that they would like to see from the process. Their requirements are usually defined by Finance and passed down by Management through the organisation as financial goals. Quite frequently, these goals bear little relation to the operational reality of an organisation but are cited during workshops to support the Current Process.
Company culture, those little decisions made every day, can determine what the employees and participants in the process perceive as business value. These can be as varied as “this would make my life easier” through to “this simplifies my part of the process”. Company culture also defines what is acceptable behaviour and where attention and efforts are best focused. So, if a Manager, with his or her own priorities, points to the direction in which efforts should be focused, then this also impacts the decision-making and perception of value within a company.
Intercompany trading – anyone familiar with the scenario of large volumes of materials traded between sister companies in a large organisation, will know that this leads to long discussions about Business Value and who the customer is. The longer the internal supply chains, the more intense the discussions.
External constraints – these come in all shapes and sizes ranging from physical space constraints, through to legal and resource constraints placed up companies by the market or government. Business value also depends on meeting these obligations.
When running a VSM workshop, it is a good thing to get these issues out in the open early on. I favour putting them on a whiteboard at one end of the room to keep them in sight throughout the mapping process as a reminder of what other forces are acting on the process in its current state.
By noting down each of the influences, the team can then challenge the rationale behind them, frequently leading to some deep insights and identifying “broken” processes or “rabbit holes”. These, in turn, can also provide the subject(s) for the next few workshops, but also help the workshop stay focused on improving the targeted process.
I have a fond memory of one VSM session where a statement was made of how “Senior Management” in a very large company wanted IT updates rolled out with minimum impact for them. It turned out that minimum impact meant that they didn’t want to be "ambushed by updates" when they were shutting down their laptop for the day – it was an unpredictable process for them. Company culture, however, interpreted their request differently, it viewed it as a constraint, which lead to a labour-intensive, bloated process. In the end, we managed to remove ¾ of the manpower and ¾ of the process days, by looking at and challenging the Business Value as driven and perceived by company culture.
There is a whole raft of thinking and discussion associated with Agile that focusses on Business Value, yet even in Agile environments Business Value can be difficult to define and grasp, a bit like a Snark. In traditional, hierarchical companies Business Value definition can become a veritable Boojum from “The Hunting of the Snark”. Or, as Philip Kruchen put it in “The Elephants in the Agile Room”
“Elephant 13 - Business value
… mentioned everywhere, but not clearly defined, or pushed onto others to resolve “
So, next time in a workshop when teams are deciding if something is “Value-Add”, Non-Value-Add, but Necessary” or “Non-value add”, maybe add a board for “Business Value assumptions, definitions and constraints”?
For the Snark’s a peculiar creature, that won’t
Be caught in a commonplace way.
Do all that you know, and try all that you don’t:
Not a chance must be wasted to-day!”
ps. For some excellent reading on the subject of business value, may I suggest “The Art of Business Value” by Mark Schwartz
pps. Constructive comments and insights, as ever, are most welcome.
Comments