“When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.”
Source: The Outstanding Organization: Generate Business Results by Eliminating Chaos and Building the Foundation for Everyday Excellence
“If you want engagement, you must engage.”
Source: The Outstanding Organization: Generate Business Results by Eliminating Chaos and Building the Foundation for Everyday Excellence
“Chaos is the enemy of any organization the strives to be outstanding.”
Source: The Outstanding Organization: Generate Business Results by Eliminating Chaos and Building the Foundation for Everyday Excellence
“Chaos is NOT a condition of doing business.”
Source: The Outstanding Organization: Generate Business Results by Eliminating Chaos and Building the Foundation for Everyday Excellence
“You need to choose wisely: what are the two to five metrics that provide the best reflection of overall value stream performance?”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“The problem is that most organizations have established neither value streams KPIs more process-level KPIs. This is the primary reason why organizations continue to fight fires, don't capture greater market share, don't generate as much profit as they could, have burned-out workforces, and create self-inflicted chaos that they could otherwise avoid.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“Process mapping teams often get stalled by excessive focus on variation and differences within processes, whereas value stream maps reveal macro-level similarities.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“it's unrealistic to expect work systems that have existed for years or even decades to be completely transformed in a matter of months. Any consultant who tells you that it's likely, or even possible, should be shown the door”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“one advantage of working backward is that the reverse perspective can sometimes reveal opportunities and problem-solving strategies that taking the usual course may not uncover.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“When the team members have achieved a deep understanding of the current state and they are mapping on consecutive days, designing the future state often occurs organically- as long as people are open to challenging their existing silo-centric paradigms about how and where work should be performed”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“You want those closet to the work designing tactical-level improvements rather than leaders who are too far from the work to determine exactly what should be done to reach a target condition.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“Depending on the organization, designing an improved state can also require thick skin, intestinal fortitude, and a hefty dose of courage.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“There's a big difference between needing to change a plan because new data or new conditions warrant it and deviating from a plan because an avoidable distraction has taken away the focus of an improvement team”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“experiencing fewer problems and frustrations in their day-to-day work, the work force will become even more engaged in the improvement process”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“By comparing the defined target with actual results, the team can determine if its hypothesis was proven and make appropriate adjustments if it wasn't”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“we use the term countermeasure instead of solution, to aid in creating a continuous improvement culture, which begins with how people think and speak. The word solution smacks of an over-the-wall, permanent-fix mindset, which discounts the ever-changing world we work and live in.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“In practice, all ideas need to be viewed as merely hypotheses; testing and evaluation of the test results must precede across-the-board adoption.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“Improvements are temporary countermeasures, not permanent solutions.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“Beware leaders that want to negotiate for shorter time frames than the team feels is prudent. Most leaders have been away from the front lines for a long time and have grown out of touch with how long it takes to plan and execute well-thought-out improvements.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“In terms of overall transformation plan ownership, we recommend a sole accountable party.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“It bears repeating: in our experience, the plan review meetings are a key success factor in value stream transformation.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“We find a direct link between results and the degree to which the executive sponsor remains visibly engaged.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“Executing and sustaining change requires a different set of organizational behaviors than those required for planning.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“Whereas clarity and ingenuity are required for creating current and future state maps, focus and discipline are essential for successfully executing and sustaining improvement.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“You need to talk about it. Explain it. Let people ask questions.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“In the spirit of respect for people, and as a means to facilitate plan execution, workers who are part of the process or those who will be affected by the improvements must also be aware of the mapping activity and the plan for transformation.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“Following this scientific process assures that everyone involved in making improvements is thinking critically and breaking old habits of prematurely leaping to solutions or rushing through execution for the sake of meeting a deadline.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“When we ask leaders and improvement professionals what the most difficult aspect to making change is, they nearly always say, "Sustaining.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“We cannot empathize this enough: sustaining improvements begins with proper planning, followed by proper execution and management.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“Once you've successfully realized the iterated future state, you must have two things firmly in place to sustain it: (1) someone formally designated to monitor value stream performance to assess how it's performing, facilitate problem solving when issues arise, and lead ongoing improvement to raise the performance bar, and (2) key performance indicators to tell whether performance is on track or not (value stream management)”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“In mature continuous improvement organizations, value stream managers are sometimes given responsibility for profit and loss across the value stream”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“We're often asked how frequently a value stream should be improved. The answer is continuously. We understand that's a tall order for many organizations, but continuous improvement is your only way out of a culture of reactive firefighting, which prevents your organization from excelling on all levels.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“Learning to see and manage work from a value stream perspective is a powerful way to instill new ways of thinking into the DNA of your organization and achieve higher levels of performance.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“During the three-day mapping activity, the team had numerous discussions about the role of software testing, customer involvement and responsibility, striking the right balance of iterations, and how "minimal" a minimally viable product should be.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“Rather than viewing value stream mapping as just a toll to reduce operational waste, the broader use of value stream mapping as a methodology to transform leadership thinking, define strategy and priorities, and assure that customers are receiving high levels of value is where value stream mapping earns its brightest stripes.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“The primary type of value stream is one in which a good or service is requested by and delivered to an external customer. Other value streams support the delivery of value; we refer to these as value-enabling or supporting value streams.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“The inclination to jump into the weeds and design micro-level improvements before the entire work system - the macro picture- is fully understood, is a key contributor to suboptimization.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“Suboptimization occurs when you make an improvement to one component of a system while ignoring the effects of that change on the other components. A seemingly important improvement could cause the overall work system to perform more poorly.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“Transformation requires fundamental changes in an organization's DNA; done well, value stream mapping can be instrumental in facilitating the necessary shifts in mindsets and behaviors.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“The visual nature of value stream maps enables consensus-building conversations across the organization, from the front lines to senior leaders.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“the most powerful metric we've seen for analyzing processes in office, service, and knowledge work environments: percent complete and accurate (%C&A)”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“Failure to involve leadership, employ cross-functional teams, and include relevant metrics, for example, often results in subpar future state designs that collect dust.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“significant time and money is wasted when organizations attempt to make improvements without a clearly defined, externally focused improvement strategy that places the customer in the center.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“Value stream mapping provides a clear line of sight to the customer and the holistic means to clearly see how traditionally disparate parts of the organization are interconnected, which can serve as the catalyst for reorganizing according to value streams.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“Very few things are unmanageable once they are distilled to their basic components.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“It's the process of value stream mapping rather than the maps themselves that carries the greatest power by installing transformational mindsets and behaviors into the DNA of an organization.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“a typical value stream map has three key components: information flow, work flow, and a timeline.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“Companies that reorganize without understanding their value streams may experience short-term improvement, but longer-term gains are far more likely by using value stream thinking to shape the reorganization.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“Effective planning is a significant contributor in elevating value stream mapping from a tool to a management practice that produces long-lasting transformation”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
“People are typically more comfortable talking with others in their own environment; being asked to come to a conference room to help a leadership-heavy team evaluate work flow can evoke understandable anxiety and make them feel like they are on a witness stand. It is much more effective to go to them.”
Source: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation