Improvement Roadmap Session Overview

An overview of the improvement roadmap 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

Improvement Roadmap

• Collect the shortlist of improvements from the Future State Map
• Discuss which actions can we take to implement them
• Prioritize the actions in according to impact and feasibility
• Sequence the actions into a roadmap, with progress measures, owners and anticipated obstacles

Session Kickoff

With a shortlist of improvements from the Future State Map, the team discusses which actions can be taken to implement them. These are concrete actions that the team believes can be completed within the next 3 months.

Prioritize: Impact and Feasibility

• Sort the actions in according to impact
• Sort the actions in according to feasibility, keeping the same order as the impact
• Indicate dependencies between actions

Build the Roadmap

• Sequence the actions into a roadmap, with actions highest in importance and feasibility coming first
• Divide actions into 3 columns: now, next, later
• Identify measures of progress for “Now” items
  • How will you know if you’re making progress?
• Who will own each “Now” action
  • This is not necessarily the person who will do the work, but the person who is accountable for following up on the action and measuring progress during the follow-up period
• Identify anticipated obstacles for “Now” items
  • What could prevent us from doing this?

Key Outcome

The team achieves:

• A roadmap with clear actions, owners, measures of progress and anticipated obstacles, for the next 3 months. This represents the consensus of the team on what will get us closer to our goals.
• A collective understanding of the value stream, the main processes involved, timings, dependencies, waste sources, improvement targets and what concrete actions we can start taking now to move towards the goal we defined during the plannign.

Next Steps

After the last mapping session we have a final presentation to show the findings from the team and next steps. We can’t fit everyone in the mapping team, so this is a good place to create buy-in with stakeholders that will help us actually put the improvements in practice.

Actually achieving the improvements takes more than drawing pictures on a board during a workshop. A lot of work has gone into this initiative already, and we don’t want to leave that collecting dust. We need to translate this into actual stuff that happens, and contributes to our goals.

To do that, we’ve created a roadmap, and we’ll follow up on that over the next few months, measuring progress to make sure we’re on track to achieve the improvements, 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.

The actions we have are experiments. They are the product of taking this holistic view of the value stream, getting the key people together and applying lean principles. We don’t know if they are going to get us closer to our goals. But they are our collective best guess, based on the data we have collected. Running the experiments means we get more and better data, and are taking an active step in improving.

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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.