A Year of Value Stream Mapping: Lessons from 5 Workshops

A Year of Value Stream Mapping: What I Learned Running 5 Workshops

After facilitating Value Stream Mapping workshops across 5 different platform teams and teams of teams, here’s what actually worked (and what didn’t):

What went well

Real impact:

• One team reduced deployment lead time from 21 days to 7 days immediately after the workshop (this wasn’t their biggest challenge, as we found during the workshop)

• One team reduced deployment lead time from 28 days to 10 days immediately after the workshop

Most of the benefits came from the mapping activities themselves, meaning

• “as a department, now we understand how pressure for last minute changes causes a lot of the unplanned work no one is enjoying”

• “we as a team understand and are able to communicate how dependent we are on other teams for our outcomes to be positive - we can now make a case for collaboration”

• “we thought our biggest problem was lack of automation, when in fact, it’s out missing capabilities in monitoring and alerting”

Clarity over confusion: Teams got consensus on what problems to tackle first, but the starting point was everyone had different priorities, or were unsure about what is the priority.

Data-driven decisions: Teams started making improvement choices based on data, and working together across functions, instead of competing silos.

Reality checks

Speed matters: 2+ months from planning to action killed momentum in 2 of the workshops. Teams lost interest when priorities shifted.

Leadership buy-in is non-negotiable: Without leadership alignment, even great team insights go nowhere

Start small: Complex workshops exhausted people. Simple workshops worked better

Online sessions: People are more distant, disconnected, and it’s less natural and consumes more energy. However, online is significantly more convenient and might be the only option available.

Key Lessons from 1 year of Value Stream Mapping

• Move fast: Start to finish in 2 weeks max for single teams
• Get leadership outcomes first, then involve the team
• Read the room: Flexibility beats following a rigid plan
• Follow-up action matters: If no actions are taken post-workshop, benefits will be limited (which doesn’t mean you don’t get benefits just from the group sessions, but continuous improvement is an ongoing activity, it’s not a workshop)
• In-person beats online every time: we connect better in person, and these fast-paced sessions work better in real life.

VSM isn’t magic - it’s providing space for the right conversations to happen. But change has to come 1st from leadership, and then from the team’s willingness to actually change.

These were some of the topics we covered in my last week’s talk at Alex’s product group.

• Motivation to try VSM: why did the team want to do it?

• Results achieved: what was the impact?

• What didn’t go as well: initiatives that fell short of expectations, teams that struggled with adoption, and workshops that didn’t land as intended

• Lesions learned: what did I take from this workshop to improve the following ones?