How does a value stream mapping workshop inform rapid and effective decision-making?
In agile, rapid decision-making is facilitated by pushing decisions and authority to make decisions down to the experts who are working in the value stream. The people who are actively doing the work and are most qualified to understand the consequences of their decisions.
In a traditional project management environment, that would be the opposite, and decision-making would generally be pushed up to a senior manager, leader, or even committee.
Challenges around rapid, effective decision-making.
Sometimes, the agile world and the traditional world collide, and something that is beyond the influence and control of the team needs senior leadership or executives to decide.
This causes delays.
If it’s a committee, it could take months or even years for a decision to be made.
If it’s an executive or senior leader, it may take weeks or months before that decision is made.
In some cases, a decision won’t be made because the executive, senior manager or committee don’t have enough information and insight to confidently make a judgement call, and so it gets passed back down with a request for a report or presentation to support the request.
During this time, the team are blocked (at worst) or redirected onto less valuable work until the issue is resolved or the decision has been made (at best).
Value Stream Mapping Workshop Benefits
Because the executives, leadership teams, and product development teams are all in the same room and the value stream is mapped, including bottlenecks and problem areas, the leadership teams are empowered to make rapid, effective decisions.
There is often a disconnect between how executives imagine the team work and how the team do actually perform the work; the value stream mapping workshop makes these differences visible and allows the leadership team to understand the line of reasoning behind the experts’ requests or recommendations.
It empowers leadership teams to act on the delays and decide whether a current process, system or tool needs to be reinvented or abandoned to delete the bottleneck and allow value to flow directly to customers and end-users.
Practice decentralized decision-making
The value stream mapping workshop also empowers executives and leadership teams to practice decentralized decision-making.
The value stream map allows executives to understand which elements don’t need executive or senior manager approval, and through the conversations around the bottlenecks and problems, understand that the experts working at the coalface are best positioned to make a decision.
Visualizing the problem and discussing how that problem can be quickly resolved provides executives and leadership teams with confidence that X decisions can be pushed down to the team level whilst Y decisions need to be rapidly escalated to a small team of executives for approval.
In essence, ensuring that decisions are being made closest to where the knowledge, expertise, and experience is rather than simply following a decision-making hierarchy.
Value Stream Mapping workshops facilitate working agreements between teams and leadership teams that act as guardrails for future decision making and clear boundaries around what can and can’t be acted upon at the team level.
About Value Glide
Value Glide are a SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) consultancy, coaching practice, and training specialist who work with organizations to align business objectives with customer needs and wants.
As deeply experienced agile coaches and practitioners, our team are invested in continuous learning through each client engagement and use the data and evidence we gather from each implementation to inform our training, coaching, and consulting services.
In a nutshell, empirical process control or empiricism.
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