Value Stream Mapping (VSM) is a collaborative, coaching-style workshop that brings together the teams who do the work and the leadership teams that support and facilitate the work.
Making the value stream visible and facilitating discussion, identifying solutions, and helping teams develop valuable alternatives to impediments helps crystallise the focus on vision and purpose.
Why is this important? How do we achieve that? What needs doing, now, to accomplish that?
In our experience, we can achieve more in a single day VSM workshop than companies have been able to accomplish via consultants in a 1 to 2-month period.
How?
Transparency and Insight facilitate rapid and effective decision-making.
Often, the most significant barrier to the rapid deployment of solutions is simply waiting.
Waiting for the committee to convene. Waiting for approval. Waiting for leadership teams to understand the impediments to progress and action the requests necessary for progression.
A VSM Workshop makes this clear to leadership teams and empowers them to cut through the red tape that holds teams back. It also provides a greater appreciation between the gap of how things work versus how leadership teams imagined they work.
While consultants could spend up to 2 months sifting through finer details to achieve a 5% gain in productivity and effectiveness, a VSM workshop can identify the bottlenecks that represent as much as 80% of the time which is wasted as a natural part of the operational processes and procedures.
‘Identify up to an 80% potential gain in productivity and effectiveness, in a single day virtual workshop?’ you may ask.
Yes. It’s been done time and again.
You’re welcome.
How do we do this with Covid-19 and Social Distancing present?
In response to Covid-19 and its impact on companies and communities, we’ve created a digital VSM Workshop via Zoom.
Our online training element, as a response to Covid-19, has helped us practice and perfect our virtual presentation and facilitation skills, which we’re now deploying to workshops and online coaching with great effect.
In many ways, hosting these workshops in a digital format has removed geographical and time barriers for our clients, and it’s never been easier to get the right people in the right digital room, at the right time.
Being a coach is about helping teams discover great questions and action great answers.
A VSM Workshop is an incredibly fluid, interactive, and engaging experience. Insight begets Insights. Good solutions are the building blocks for great solutions.
A great coach becomes the bridge between the current reality and the preferred reality.
We help your teams articulate something incredibly nebulous, ‘the way things work around here,’ and help crystallise that, visually and consensually, into an actionable framework that becomes the vision and purpose-made manifest.
“In the current climate, teams don’t need tasks. They need purpose”
– John McFadyen
The purpose of a VSM Workshop is to define and articulate a clear purpose.
Why? How? What? Articulated and graphically represented through Post-It notes on a wall.
Embedding Capability through Workshops
The first VSM Workshop is often ‘the motherlode’ for a team, department, or business unit.
It’s the visual framework that crystallises thinking, operational workflows, and facilitates the kind of discussion and thinking that rarely gets airtime in organisations.
While the end-result is gold, the real treasure lies in the process of arriving at the answers.
It’s this process, this attention to discovery, and the flow of the workshop that helps your internal Agile coaches and Scrum Masters build the next, internally owned and facilitated VSM workshop.
They will have a frame of reference, tools, and insight into how to optimise the experience for maximum gains. And they will be working with a solid point of departure, the initial VSM workshop, as the reference point for future workshops.
While we’d love to host these regularly for you, and with you, we’re deeply committed to building and nurturing Agile capabilities within organisations and helping your teams to develop and host regular VSM workshops, on a continuous improvement basis, within your organisations is the ultimate goal of our VSM workshop.
If you’d like to schedule a workshop, please touch base with our team on enquiries@agilecentre.com.
On a personal note, I’m running one-to-one video conversations on Zoom, where you get to ask me anything. 60 minutes. Free of Charge. No social contact, only connection. It’s free of consulting and marketing-speak, and my response to Covid-19: how I get to contribute in the most meaningful and valuable way I know-how.
If you’d like to connect with me on Zoom, send an email to enquiries@agilecentre.com, and we’ll get back to you with a date and time to connect.