A value stream identification workshop is designed to help the team and organization identify and understand how the customer derives and captures value from the product, feature, or service.
In other words, how does the organization make money by effectively serving its customers.
A Value Glide agile coach and SAFe expert will work with a select group of individuals from your organization to identify the flow of value, from its point of creation to the moment it is delivered to the customer.
We map out the customer journey and understand the series of steps the customer needs to take, from the moment they reach out until the moment that they receive the product, feature, or service.
Why is a value stream identification workshop important?
Traditional organizations, especially environments that are not truly agile, are functionally designed and organized around the resources, capabilities, and competencies of the organization rather than around the flow of value to the customer.
So, we think in terms of functions like:
- A sales function.
- A marketing function.
- A technology function.
- A testing function.
And so forth.
The workshop allows us to identify and visualize the customer journey in terms of flow, rather than thinking of a customer bouncing through various functions to get the product, feature, or service they are looking for.
We view the customer in terms of their journey from interest to acquisition and understand how value is created and captured throughout the whole value stream.
How does a Value Stream Identification workshop work?
The Value Stream Identification workshop takes around a full working day to work through if we have all the relevant people available for the workshop. In some circumstances, it might take two days to work through, but in 80% of the instances, it is a full working day.
We don’t need a great number of people to host a successful workshop.
Traditionally, we aim for between 15 and 25 people per workshop, and that is a blend of people who work at the coalface of product development, people who work across different functions in the value stream, and a small group of leaders who are actively invested in the value stream.
The people who attend and participate in the workshop need to understand:
- What are the business functions necessary to deliver the product to the customer?
- What are the underpinning systems and processes that enable the customer journey?
- How do the systems and processes integrate or interconnect to enable the value stream?
- The technical elements that underpin or support the value stream, end-to-end.
- The skills necessary to support the infrastructure and journey?
- How the skills or capabilities necessary to deliver the value stream are distributed, for example, where geographically and physically is the team located?
We need this information and insight so that when we design the team or team of teams, that is going to empower, service, and support this value stream, they are as cohesive and integrated as possible.
We are aiming to identify and create the minimum number of hand-offs, delays, and dependencies possible to enable a powerful and effective customer experience.
Value Stream Mapping Workshop Options
We provide the Value Stream Mapping workshop as part of our SAFe Quickstart ART Launch program, but we also do a lot of standalone workshops for organizations and start-ups which you can find here.
Some of our smaller customers are looking to identify their value streams before moving forward with the Value Stream Mapping workshop, and this is a great first step in identifying how value is created and captured throughout the entire value chain.
About Value Glide
Value Glide is a SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) consultancy, coaching practice, and training specialist that works with organizations to align business objectives with customer needs and wants.
As deeply experienced agile coaches and practitioners, our team is invested in continuous learning through each client engagement and uses 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.
If you are thinking of adopting agile within your organization and have identified SAFe as a great agile framework to adopt, implement and improve your business agility, visit our SAFe Quickstart ART Launch program page or view our SAFe Consulting Services page.
If you have identified a need for an agile coach and SAFe coach to help your organization adopt and implement SAFe, visit our SAFe Coaching Services page.
If you want to know more about SAFe and how to lead SAFe, visit our SAFe Training page for a host of options, from Leading SAFe to a SAFe Release Train Engineer course.
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