Understanding Value Streams – Part 1 of 5

In continuation of previous article.

The concept of value stream is not a new one. It’s been around since the dawn of lean manufacturing. Anything that delivers a product or a service can be thought of as a value stream. To make things interesting, industry has many flavors of value stream definition.

Value Stream Definitions from Various Sources

• Scaled Agile Framework: A Value Stream is the sequence of activities that contains all the people, systems, information, and materials needed to deliver value to a customer. https://scaledagileframework.com/glossary/
• Gartner: A value stream is the sequence of activities necessary to deliver a product, service, or experience to a customer, internal or external. Value streams cut across and connect siloed business capabilities. They provide end-to-end visibility of the activity flow, from customer request to delivery.
• TOGAF: Value Stream Guide https://pubs.opengroup.org/togaf-standard/business-architecture/value-streams.html
• PMI Disciplined Agile: Value Streams https://www.pmi.org/disciplined-agile/process/value-streams
• Book References:
• Lean Product and Process Development by Allen C. Ward and Durward K. Sobek II
• Learning to See by Mike Rother & John Shook

Challenges in Interpretation

As you can imagine, various definitions (even when intent is similar) may lead to situations where your team, stakeholders, and organization have different interpretations of a value stream.

Signals of Misinterpretation

Some signals and consequences of not having a consistent shared understanding include:

• False sense of progressive change
• Frustration among teams, leading to chaos as existing silos persist under new label(s)
• Lower engagement of change agents
• Teams’ participation and engagement energy taper off due to constant battles/friction about what a value stream is, making change adoption harder

Solutions and Success Patterns

What can be done? How to avoid such consequences and reduce adverse impact? Is there a success pattern to leverage?

Success Pattern: Define and document.

Align and have buy-in on the value stream definition for your organization’s context.

Publish and make the value stream definition visible, and reiterate it at various forums for consistent interpretation at all levels of your organization.

Of course, getting the right people involved, communication and training is crucial too. I will talk about that along with types of value streams in next article.

Note: this post is my perspective and not of my employer.