Current State Mapping Session Overview

An overview of the Current State Mapping session of a Value Stream Mapping Workshop. The full workshop includes:

1. Planning
2. Current State Mapping
3. Dependency Mapping
4. Future State Mapping
5. Improvement Roadmap
6. Final Presentation
7. Follow-up Period

Current State Mapping: reviewing goals, mapping processes, analyzing constraints, and achieving cross-team alignment.

Session Kickoff

• Briefly review planning before starting the mapping process:
  • Motivation: What’s driving the need for improvement?
  • Scope: Define value stream focus and specific conditions
    • Example: Onboarding new customers vs upgrading existing ones
    • Example: Focus on delivering product A vs product B
  • Goals: Establish measurable goals for next 3 months

Mapping Process

• Start mapping the value stream:
  • Add blocks representing the main processes to the board
  • Estimate cycle time for each block
  • Estimate wait time between each block
  • Add other useful context-specific metrics:
    • Errors and rework at problematic spots
    • Queues and amount of work in progress
• Calculate summary metrics for the entire value stream

Analysis

• Identify and highlight hotspots:
  • Where are the longest cycle and wait times?
  • Where do errors or rework occur most often?
  • Where does work pile up?
• Highlight key constraint to focus on next:
  • What improvements will have the biggest impact on our goals?
  • Usually focuses on reducing end-to-end duration
  • For teams with fixed release schedules, may focus on quality problem areas

Key Outcomes

The team achieves:

• Consensual representation of main processes in end-to-end value stream
• Estimations of cycle and wait times for each main process
• Cross-functional alignment on key improvement areas that will have biggest impact on goals

Glossary

• Cycle time: The total time it takes to complete a specific process from start to finish, including both work time and wait time.
• Wait time: The duration of time that work items spend waiting to be processed in a value stream, often due to dependencies or resource constraints.

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Inspiration

This approach is heavily inspired by

• Steve Pereira and Andrew Davis’s Flow Engineering book.
• Karen Martin and Mike Osterling’s Value Stream Mapping book.