Value Stream Mapping Charter
The Charter
I have used a Charter to plan for Value Stream Mapping workshops that are more complex, involve multiple teams or an entire department.
For a smaller workshop, I’d use a lighter approach: Outcome Mapping
When building the Charter, we work together to define improvement needs, goals, benefits, participants, and next steps.
It includes conducting interviews, defining the scope of the workshop and aligning with current ongoing initiatives.
I’ve used a charter to plan for Value Stream Mapping workshops. But it can be used to plan any improvement initiative. See for yourself why:
- Why do we want to improve?
- What are the benefits of improving?
- How will we measure if we are improving?
- What are our improvement goals?
- What is the Value Stream we will focus on?
- What are the key teams with a major role in the process?
- What’s in the way of meeting our goals?
The conversations we have around these questions are already aligning everyone on what we want to accomplish, how the customer, business and teams benefit from it, and how we can know if we are making progress.
The point is not to fill out a template. But to get people’s input and have conversations that align everyone on where we want to go, and what value stream we should focus on to get there.
Here’s a link to the Charter template in a google doc.
Bellow is the same template:
Value Stream Mapping Charter Template
Scope: Ex: Improvement of the deployment and release process for ____.
Purpose of this document: Define improvement needs, goals, benefits, team members, and next steps.
1. What’s driving the need for improvement?
Current state problems and business needs:
(for example)
- Improve release quality and reduce unplanned downtime to increase customer satisfaction.
- Improve the end-to-end deployment process to reduce errors, unplanned work, and costs, while increasing speed, team productivity, and the value delivered to customers.
- Increase release frequency to deliver features faster, remove obstacles, and generate higher returns.
- Align teams with a major role in the process on a clear path from development to customer value delivery.
2. Benefits of Improving
How will internal/external customers benefit as a result of improvements to the Value Stream? (directly/indirectly)
Benefits to the Company:
Benefits to the Customer:
3. Metrics
3-5 Metrics used to track progress towards adding value to the customer and the business:
(for example)
- Deployment lead time: 4 weeks
- Number of incidents: 3 per year
- Incident lead time: 2 weeks
4. Goals
This is what we want to achieve over the Improvement time frame of 3 months:
(for example)
- Reduce deployment lead time from 4 weeks to 3 weeks (25% improvement)
- Reduce number of incidents from 3 per year to 2 per year (33% improvement)
- Reduce incident lead time from 2 weeks to 1 week (50% improvement)
5. Scope
| Aspect | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Value Stream | Describe the value stream to be mapped. | Release changes to customers. |
| Main Steps | Outline the main steps in the value stream. | Start - changes pushed to main, …, End - changes are running successfully on customer’s side. |
| Specific Conditions | Focus on one product, customer type, or scenario to reduce variation. Narrow the path as much as possible for clarity. | Deployment of only one of the products; most relevant subset of customers; most common/important circumstances. |
| Demand Rate | Volume of incoming work per day, week, month, year, etc. | 1 deployment per month |
| Boundaries and Limitations | Organizational, financial, systems, or customer related constraints. | We have to go through a change management process, attend CAB meeting. |
| Improvement Time Frame | Given where we stand in our Metrics, what is the time window where we can realize our Goals? | 3 months |
6. Relevant Stakeholders
Who has a significant role in the value stream?
6.1 Mapping Team
| Role | Description | Participants |
|---|---|---|
| Executive Sponsor | Ultimately accountable for the results, ideally oversees the entire value stream. | 1. |
| Value Stream Lead | Ideally accountable for the performance of the entire value stream. Close to the work being done. | 2. |
| Mapping Team | Ideally, 5-7 participants. | |
| Development Team | 3. | |
| QA Team | 4. | |
| Infrastructure Team | 5. | |
| Product Team | 5. | |
| Facilitator |
6.2 People to keep in the loop / Final Briefing Attendees
7. Risks
- What is in the way of meeting our goals?
8. Logistics
| Sessions | Duration | Date | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| Workshop Planning | It varies. Ex: 2 sessions of 45 min + interviews | Week Before | Define improvement needs, goals, benefits, and next steps |
| Current State Value Stream Mapping | 1h30min | Monday | Find and measure key constraints |
| Dependency Mapping | 1h30min | Tuesday | Connect constraints to dependencies |
| Future State Value Stream Mapping | 1h30min | Wednesday | Design improved flow |
| Improvement Roadmap | 1h30min | Thursday | Create and plot clear next steps |
| Final Briefing | 30min | Friday | Share workshop findings, create buy-in |
| Follow-up period | 30min every 2 weeks | Following 3 months | Measure progress, adjust, remove blockages |
9. Next Steps
- Onboard relevant stakeholders.
- Define the mapping team.
- Collect relevant data about the releases - the current state of the metrics.
- Schedule the workshop sessions.
10. Relevant Information
11. Glossary
- Change lead time: The time it takes for a code commit or change to be successfully deployed to production.
- Deployment frequency: How often application changes are deployed to production.
- Change fail rate: The percentage of deployments that cause failures in production, requiring hotfixes or rollbacks.
- Failed deployment recovery time: The time it takes to recover from a failed deployment.
Inspiration
- This approach is heavily inspired by Karen Martin and Mike Osterling’s Value Stream Mapping book.
- Karen Martin’s course Value Stream Transformation Part 1 provides excellent guidance on creating a value stream charter.
- Karen Martin’s Socratic questions for improvement initiatives are a powerful tool for leading the discovery sessions required to build the charter.
- Steve Pereira and Andrew Davis’s Flow Engineering book offers complementary perspectives on value stream optimization. They use a different approach: the Outcome Map.