Stop Talking, Start Drawing! A Quick and Dirty Value Stream Example.

Recently I was helping a team out in a sprint planning session. All development is very waterfall (that’s a topic for another post), and it follows a very well defined, albeit inefficient, process.

We were talking about how to “streamline” the process to deliver this particular product, which was nothing more than an electronic representation of a printed document.

We talked and talked. We were “talking” about the process. I decided to draw the process we were talking about so the entire team could visualize it. It is a very quick and dirty value stream map, and can be considered incomplete, but sufficient for the needs of the team at this point in time.

Below is a re-drawing of the first stab minus the “details” 🙂

Delivery Process

I then asked the team if there were any opportunities to improve. The collective answer was “no, the process is already streamlined“.

Okay, sweet. But, I’ve never seen a process that can’t be improved. Ever. And I’m old.

Then I asked how “long” we stopped at each step in the process, i.e. how long each step took. Below is the same drawing plus the weighting.

Delivery Process With Weights

Notice any thing interesting? Anything stand out? Well, I’m sure you caught it. The “unit test” box is 40 hours, while everything else is 8 or less. Hrmmm….I wonder? Could we maybe do something there?

Well, we explored it a bit, and found that how we’ve been doing things is throwing them over the wall so the consumers of the documentation can eyeball and test this stuff. Guess what they did if they found something wrong? They spent time creating a document to tell the developers what to change. Then, back around it went.

So, an option the team came up with to reduce the time spent in the unit testing “state”, was that when unit testing began, they would have the developers sit by the folks who actually tested the documents, then they would “tell” them what to change…then change it…then send it back to test. No emailing and creating painful documents describing what’s wrong. Just good old fashioned face to face conversation. The team is confident that they can significantly reduce the 40 hours of unit testing.

Will this work perfectly? No. There will be more opportunities for improvement…as always. But, you know what? We would have never explored this option of we would not have visualized the process by drawing it.

Oh, guess how long this took us? About 20 minutes. Yup…20 minutes. That’s it. How long did we talk in circles before we drew? Hrmmm…about 1/2 an hour, and it got us nowhere.

So, as soon as you start talking and talking and talking and talking and getting nowhere. Get off your butt, and start drawing.