Future State Mapping Session Overview

An overview of the future 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

Future State Mapping

• Review the findings so far: the bottleneck, the main challenges and their root causes
• Discuss sources of waste in the value stream and improvement countermeasures
• Re-design the value stream: what would it look like if we addressed the bottleneck and implemented the countermeasures?

Session Kickoff

• Review the goals of the initiative
• Review the primary bottleneck in the current process
• Review the main challenges and their root causes

Sources of Waste

• Create a copy of the current state map to use as future state starting point
• Discuss the lean sources of waste, and how they show up in the current process
  • Where could we better utilize our team’s skills?
  • Where are defects showing up?
  • Where are handoffs happening?
  • etc.

Countermeasures

• Discuss common countermeasures for the sources of waste we discussed
  • Improve quality at the source
  • Move validation earlier in the process
  • Reduce handoffs
  • etc.
• Discuss what these countermeasures would look like for us What would these improvements look like for us?
  • Which action will have the highest impact on our goals, over the next 3 months?
  • What can get us maximal results with minimal effort?
  • What is the low hanging fruit?

Future State Map

For one of the teams I worked with, both me and the Director of Engineering agreed that the team’s processes were already in a good state of optimization, and that we weren’t expecting any major changes from the current state workflow to the future state workflow. Mostly because the team was already doing a good job at reducing waste, and the biggest gains would come from improving dependencies with other teams. But when the team started designing the future state workflow, they were able to move some validation steps earlier, parallelize some processes, and remove a few handoffs. We were both surprised at the positive effect this had on the quality (from 14% to 68%) and end-to-end lead time of the value stream (from 138 days to 88 days).

This sounds great, right? But how do we get there? Actually achieving the future state workflow takes more than drawing a pretty picture. A lot of work has gone into this initiative already, and we don’t want to lose all that progress and insights. We need to translate this into actual stuff that happens, and contributes to our goals.

To do that, we’ll create a roadmap in the next session, and we’ll follow up on that roadmap over the next few months, to make sure we’re on track to achieve the future state workflow, and if we need to make any adjustments. Plans change and that’s reality! But we need to stay on top of it, change direction mindfully, keep people in the loop and keep the goals in mind.

Key Outcomes

The team achieves:

• A shared understanding of the main sources of waste in the current process, and corresponding countermeasures
• A consensus on the top improvement targets for the value stream
• A re-design of the value stream for improved flow

With the future state map, the team has a target state to work towards, and clarity on improvements needed to get there.

Next Steps

• Create a roadmap for the future state workflow
• Follow up on the roadmap over the next few months

Glossary

• Lead Time: The proverbial “clock-time” of a process. The total time it takes to complete a specific process from start to finish, including both work time and wait time.
• Quality: “How often does this process deliver work that doesnt require clarifying missing information, has no errors or defects?“. It’s measured by “Percent Complete and Accurate - %C/A”. It reflects the quality of each process’s output. It is obtained by asking downstream customers what percentage of the time they receive work that is “usable as is”, meaning they can do their work without having to correct the information that was provided, add or clarify missing information.

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Inspiration

This approach is heavily inspired by

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