My Experience with Cesar Arce's 3-Day Value Stream Management Training at Agilizar

Sharing my feedback on the 3-day training program on Value Stream Management by Cesar Arce @ Agilizar

This training program exceeded my expectations. I came away with both a solid theoretical foundation in Value Stream Management and practical tools I can immediately apply in my work.

What impressed me most was how someone with no prior VSM knowledge could attend this course and leave equipped to run their own workshops and continue learning independently. The course prepares you as well as possible. The rest is about getting your hands dirty and putting it into practice.

I wish I had access to this training when I first started with VSM. I spent months studying manuals and articles, planning mapping exercises from scratch, and preparing my first workshops without the clear structure and key concepts taught here. This course would have saved me so much time of overthinking, trial and error.

One of the most valuable aspects is how we progressed through all stages of Value Stream Management during the training, coming away with ready-to-use templates. This removes the initial barrier to getting started: this took me multiple iterations, significant personal time and making mistakes in the real world.

The best parts are Cesar Arce’s real-life stories of applying VSM in the wild. Theory only takes you so far, and these practical anecdotes bring the material to reality.

Finally, there are plenty of practical exercises throughout the course where participants work together to apply VSM.

All in all, this is the best preparation I’ve seen for real-world implementation.

The most energizing part was the group exercises. Hearing Cesar’s experiences alongside questions and stories from other participants made me excited about putting this in practice. The theoretical content was equally strong, offering an excellent refresher on core VSM concepts like the Toyota Way principles, Gemba, Cynefin, OODA loops, Lean, Jidoka, respect for people, and the 5 Whys.

This training delivers exactly what practitioners need: strong fundamentals, practical exercises, and the confidence to take VSM back to their organizations.

I recommend it to anyone who wants to run Value Stream Mapping workshops!

One example I’ll share is this framework for stakeholder analysis that helps us think about the participants in a workshop. We can’t include everyone, but we don’t want to exclude the people who do the work day-to-day and know about all the problems, or the people with the power to make the necessary changes to reach our goals. This balance dictates whether you’re learning from the workshop (people who do the work) and whether the changes will actually get implemented (people with power) .I’ve struggled with this in the past and I didn’t have this: it helps!