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

Current State Mapping

Current State Mapping Example

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

Current State Mapping Example

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.

Inspiration

This approach is heavily inspired by