Quickstart ART Launch Process (6)

SAFe® Value Stream Workshops

Do You Want To Accelerate Your Agile Transformation?

SAFe Value Stream and ART Identification Workshop

Making the invisible visible

Our value stream management services help you visualize the flow, remove delays, and accelerate value delivery.

Value stream management:

  1. Identifies the Value Stream and aligns teams to streamline value delivery
  2. Maps the value flow
  3. Visualizes the flow as a kanban system
  4. Relentlessly removes delays and hand-offs as signalled and measured by the kanban system
Example value stream

What is a Value stream?

A value stream is a sequence of steps the organization takes to serve the customer. The value stream includes the people, resources, and systems that enable the organization to serve the customer. The customer receives a solution or solutions that the value stream delivers. Value streams are invisible. Even more so in knowledge work environments such as software.

Why change?

You are busy and investing more in delivery and have pockets of agility but:

  • Time to market is increasing
  • Product costs are increasing
  • Your teams are overburdened and stressed
  • You have many in-flight initiatives with few completed
  • Multiple priorities cause increased multitasking

Optimize the value stream 

Without the end-to-end view and understanding of the constraint, your investment will lead to increased cost without increased value flow. Increasing work-in-process delays the time to market even more.

 

1) Value Stream Identification Workshop

Using a structured, proven facilitated approach for collaborating with stakeholders to identify the operational and development Value Streams and teams of agile teams, the Agile Release Train (ART) can define, build, deploy, release and operate (run) business solutions.

The workshop helps stakeholders optimize the ART design by considering the impact of coordination requirements, dependencies, Epic distribution, and organizational change. Value Stream ARTs cut across the vertical product lines (functional silos), and representatives of these functions must be present when designing the ART as they will significantly reduce time to market by eliminating handoffs, reducing delays, and improving quality.

Attendees

  • How the business works operationally, the people who operate the business, and the systems they use
  • The technology landscape, what systems support what operational processes, and how those systems fit together
  • Identify the people who develop, support, and maintain the systems. 

Outcome - Identify the people who are part of the Agile Release Train (ART)

  • Dedicated ART solution architect
  • Dedicated ART Product Manager named ideally from the business
  • Dedicated RTE for the ART, someone who can lead a team of 50 to 150
  • The ART members defined names, roles, and locations
  • Product owners and scrum masters identified

Please note that we are identifying the people within the ART, not the team formation, which will happen later.

 

2) Value Stream Mapping

Value stream mapping is a lean management method for analyzing the current state and designing a future state for the events that take a product or service from its beginning to the customer. At Toyota, it is known as "material and information flow mapping".

Why do we need to map the value stream?

To better understand how the work works. We look for crucial knowledge discovery steps to know how the epics move from idea to launch the value stream. Identify the information flows, coordination and collaboration points and identify candidate areas for improvements.

The next step is to visualize the mapped value stream as a kanban system and use:

  • Flow time - Time it tasks for a work item to flow through the value stream.
  • Flow rate - The number of items completed per given period, for example, per week. 
  • Flow load - The number of items in progress.
  • Flow quality - the defects detected after launch, the number of how-to queries, user journey time, and drop-offs.
  • Flow efficiency - total time working on an item, the time the item is waiting. Calculated as total time working/(total time working + total time waiting). 

Using the flow measures to improve the flow value to customers continually.

Follow this link to learn more about Value Stream Mapping Workshop

 

3) Visualise your value stream map as a kanban system

Visualize your value stream map as a kanban system limiting the number of items in progress and measure the flow as above. 

 

4) Relentlessly improve

Using the flow measures and visualization from the kanban system, act on the sources of delay, hand-offs, and loopbacks to create a smoother flow of value to better serve the customers and learn faster.

Next Steps

We hope you've learned more about what a Value Stream and ART Identification workshop is. We have more detailed resources available here.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss how we can help run a Value stream workshop for you and your organization, don’t hesitate to get in touch at europe@valueglide.com or usa@valueglide.com

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