Value stream mapping is a team exercise, it’s collaborative, enlightening, and the foundation for professionalism.

I’m pretty well-known for saying that teams are unique and that there is no one process that satisfies every team’s needs. There is, however, one activity that I’ve seen every team we’ve worked with, in countless fields—from construction to software engineering to banking, even with groups of patent lawyers at the United States Patent and Trademark Office—and that is a value stream mapping (VSM) exercise.

More than anything else, and perhaps surprisingly, this exercise builds culture and gives teams the means to actually take control of their work. From what I’ve seen, you can’t be a self-organizing team without first seeing and understanding the work you actually do... in all its raw, painful reality.

If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you are doing.
~ W. Edwards Deming

What is value stream mapping?

The VSM exercise has a long, technical, and perhaps even off-putting name. It was originally conceived of to see the steps in any process, and identify places for improvement. A laudable goal, a worthy goal, even, and I probably lost about 25 percent of the readers by stating it.

We want to grow as professionals. We want our products to be better, our know-how to be deeper, our impact to be known and recognized.

This is impossible without continuous improvement.

I have met many mediocre professionals who are mediocre only for one reason: They feel like they are done learning.

Well, Herbie Hancock practices every day. And he’s Herbie Hancock.

I’m not Herbie Hancock, and neither are you (if you are, give me a call).

For any of us to improve or grow, we need to pay attention to what we are doing. We need this attention to be serious. However, we must remember that we’re human beings. Joy is not simply a “nice to have”; it is part of the work. Inspiration is part of the work. And seeing results is part of the work.

Continuous improvement does not mean what you think it means

The act of continuous improvement isn’t “extra work,” as so many engineers and managers have whined to me over the years. The act of continuous improvement isn’t to shave seconds off a process, as so many lean sensei have preached to me. The act of continuous improvement is not to reduce waste or cut costs, as so many cost-accounting-minded leaders have openly wished in my presence.

Respect is an abused word. Weak minds use it as a placeholder for fear. Weak egos will demand it up front. Weak hearts will use it to attach themselves to people of bluster, wishing they could be so outspoken.

We could do with a few more conversations about respect.

We can see here, sadly, that our focus on respect is at an all-time low (or at least as of the last 220 years). We should do something about this.

Respect for other people, in this lens, is at the heart of lean and agile. But neither explicitly builds respect into its means and methods. Respect for other professionals is required in any healthy system of work. Anything short is abuse or slavery.

When we use respect as a lens, we are constantly asking ourselves, “How is the individual affected by this system?” “How are these professionals able to grow in this system?” “How does the system improve under the influence of these people?”

We are respecting capability—that the professionals in the system can and should be excellent participants in and caretakers of the system we are creating. 

We focus on the work, we focus on the teams, but we rarely focus on the individuals. What does an individual professional need to be fully engaged, enthusiastic, and ready to take on new challenges?

Think of five of those needs.

At the core of any needs you wrote down is bound to be information. Communication is how information is transferred. Whether it is clarity of mission, definitions of current work, feedback from previous work, availability of other team members, disposition of colleagues, satisfaction of customers... it’s all information, and that needs to be communicated.

We inform each other, we process together, we achieve.

Both agile and lean come packed with good options for how and when to communicate. There are huddles, kaizen events, retrospectives, work-grooming sessions, A3s, and so on. Lots of tools, predefined, sanctioned, and equally prone to success and failure.

In the initial article, I defined the first lens, communication, as: