Value Stream

Looking at single tasks hides where time actually goes. A piece of work can need two hours of real effort and still take five days, because it sat in four different inboxes on the way. Mapping the whole stream shows that the biggest win is usually removing a wait or a handoff, not making any one step faster. Speeding up a step that was never the delay changes nothing the customer notices.

• Write down every step a request passes through, from the first ask to the customer seeing the result.
• Mark each step as active work or waiting.
• Add up waiting time and working time separately. The gap is usually the story.
• Pick the one wait or handoff that costs the most time and shorten or remove it first.
• Draw the map again after the change. Fixing one bottleneck tends to reveal the next.

A value stream is the whole path a piece of work takes, drawn from the moment a customer asks to the moment they receive the result. It includes the steps where someone is working and, just as importantly, the steps where the request is waiting: in an inbox, in a queue, or for a signature. The idea comes from lean manufacturing, and it applies equally to onboarding a client, shipping a feature or answering a support request.

• Mapping only the active work and ignoring the waiting time, which is usually the larger part.
• Drawing the process as people think it works, instead of following a real request through it.
• Mapping a single team instead of the whole path to the customer, so handoffs between teams stay invisible.
• Optimising a step that was never the delay.
• Making the map once and not redrawing it after a change.
• Improving the stream without measuring the total time before and after.