[MUSIC] If you've been in this industry for any length of time, you've likely encountered certain bottlenecks and even blockers that are limiting your ability to deliver value to your organization's customers. You may not even know the reason why something is getting in the way of your work. Only that it is. In this lesson, we're going to discuss a technique called value stream mapping that can help us to identify constraints and bottlenecks to delivering value. By the end of this lesson, you'll have a good idea how to, identify constraints, differentiate between lead time and cycle time. And explain how value stream mapping can be used as a starting point for collaboration and continuous flow. Value stream mapping is a valuable technique to know. In fact I've used it in each of the three major organizations I've worked for. Nordstrom, Starbucks and Nike. At it's core it's a fact based way to show how value flows through the organization. It also can be used to get the current condition of cycle time and/or lead time. And we'll talk about that more in a minute. Typically, when I've conducted a value stream mapping workshop, I've leveraged an expert to facilitate, because often, this is the first time the organization is being exposed to this technique. A workshop can be between two and five days, depending on the complexity of the value stream. In the workshop the first step is to give the group a shared understanding of lean and how it applies to software delivery. From there the team starts documenting the step by step process to ship a typical feature. Then the team will provide estimates of how long each step takes. Including the true process time along with any wait time. For example, if the step is to deploy code. The actual deployment may take three hours which would be considered the process time, but the step may take three days because it requires waiting on another team or individual to approve the deployment. Once you have all of the steps and times captured, then the team will move into documenting the future state, which almost always includes removing steps and reducing the total weight time. Success requires bringing anyone who contributes to the overall value stream together in order to document reality. This is a critical component. Sometimes leaders think they know how work is getting done, but more often than not, they don't have as firm an idea as they think they do. Having the team members create the map is important but leaders also need to play a key role. Leaders need to create the space for the teams to create the map and then to problem solve an experiment going forward to reduce waste identified in the value stream. As I mentioned earlier, value stream mapping also can help us analyze current lead time and cycle times. Let's first address the differences between lead time and cycle time. I´ll also share why I tend to focus on cycle times first. So lead time is the time it takes from an initial customer request to when that request is fulfilled. However, in the context of product development where we aim to satisfy multiple customers in ways they may not anticipate, there are key considerations of lead time. The time it takes to design and validate a product or feature. And the time to deliver the feature to customers. The time it takes to validate a product or feature can have high variability. But the time to deliver the feature is much lower in it's variability. That's from the time a developer starts working on a feature to the time it is deployed to production. It's what I typically refer to as cycle time. I tend to focus on cycle time first because it's often within technology's control. Lead time will often require business stakeholders to be engaged and if you are early in your journey, it can be challenging to influence them to participate. With cycle time, you can measure the results practicing the show don't tell approach to demonstrate how to speed up the delivery of value. One of the four capabilities of lean product development is whether teams have a good understanding of the flow of work from the business all the way through to customers, including how much visibility teams have into this flow, such as the status of products and features. In my experience, this is the best way to optimize for speed and to really understand where constraints are. This enables what we call continues flow. One piece continuous flow is when a team applies several transformation to work in progress. Which is limited to a single piece at a time. The team does a little analysis, a little design, a little building and a little testing all at once in very short cycles. The use of value stream mapping, continuous improvement and measurement of flow via cycle time, all contribute to an organization's ability to optimize the flow of value to the customer. At Nordstrom we use value stream mapping in various teams to help with establishing the true reality of flow. A lot of teams would say, we are doing two-week sprints, so that's our cycle time. Or we release every five weeks, so that's our cycle time. Once the team's created a value stream map they saw that cycle time was very different. In one case, a team that was on two week sprints actually had a cycle time of 47 days. Our goal was to get to on demand releases and we didn't want technology to be the constraint for delivering value. One team I worked with thought their cycle time was one month because that was their release cadence. After documenting their value stream map, they realized the actual cycle time was 84 days. The team was so surprised and also energized to focus on improvements to make it better. There were a lot of reasons why it was 84 days, including lack of automation, hand offs to other teams, rework because the testing feedback happened weeks after code had been delivered. That same team adjusted the workflow to leverage small batches of work. Built quality in from the beginning and worked to automate their deployment pipeline. While the team focused on these improvements, they also wanted to see how fast they could go if they broke down a feature into something small enough to run through the process. And see what the ultimate target state could be. To start, we leverage a suggestion from former CTO at. He suggested that we send through a change to a comment in a file. So basically it was a piece of work that was easy and low risk. When the team did this, they had a cycle time of 11 days. That helped with driving the improvements knowing they could get to 11 days. Once the new flow was established, we were able to focus on the rest of the challenges and see what we could do to optimize the entire value stream. Through continuous improvement and experimentation, the team cut their cycle time in half and kept problem solving with the target of getting to on-demand releases. At Nike, we have had six teams go through a value stream mapping workshop and all six teams have expressed how great it has been for collaboration and for giving visibility to bottle-necks. We've had a wide range of teams participate. Including our mobile app teams, like the Nike Running app, Nike Training app, and our main Nike app. We had our product page team, our mobile POS team, and our product catalog team. In each case we have seen some common themes emerge around manual processes. It's helping to inform broader organizational investments in automation. It is also giving teams a fact based way to talk about speed. Teams are setting targets, conducting experiments, and measuring the impacts. One of the biggest lessons I've learned as I immersed myself in lean and develops, is that it's important to first focus on how value flows to the customer. Using value stream mapping is a really great way to bring teams together. It allows you to focus on reality and identify what's blocking the flow of value. I encourage you to give it a try and see if you can improve things at your organization by implementing this technique.
