Progressive organizations are constantly looking for ways to optimize their processes, reduce waste, and deliver value to their customers more efficiently.
To achieve these goals, some have turned to the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), a set of organizational and workflow patterns designed to guide enterprises in scaling lean and agile practices for large-scale software and systems development. When embarking on their transformation journey, these organizations quickly realize that a critical early step for a successful adoption of SAFe is identifying and defining their product or service value streams.
A value stream represents the sequence of activities required to deliver a product or service to a customer, from concept to delivery, and includes all the people, processes, and technology involved. Value stream mapping is a powerful tool that helps organizations visualize how value flows through their systems, exposing bottlenecks, redundancies, and opportunities for improvement. By clearly understanding and defining what “value” means for their organizations and customers, teams can break down traditional silos, foster collaboration, and align their efforts towards a common goal. This shared understanding of value enables organizations to make informed decisions, prioritize initiatives, and optimize their resources to maximize customer satisfaction and business outcomes.
In this post, we’ll dive into the best practices for identifying and defining value streams within the context of SAFe. We’ll explore common challenges organizations face during this process and provide practical guidance on how to overcome them.
Understanding “Value” and Breaking Down Silos
Before identifying value streams, it’s essential to have a clear understanding of what “value” means for your organization and customers. Value is defined as the benefits that customers receive from your products or services, such as solving a problem, meeting a need, or providing a delightful experience. It can be an app that alerts users to sales on their favorite products, rewarding subscribers with real savings on desirable goods. It can be the navigation system in a car, the mortgage offers in a bank app, the product safety initiatives from a pharma company. By focusing on value delivery, organizations can align their efforts across different functions and departments, breaking down traditional silos.
When teams have a shared understanding of a value stream, they can collaborate more effectively, make better decisions, and focus on delivering what matters most to customers. This shared understanding helps to foster a culture of collaboration, continuous improvement and customer centricity.
Practical Guidance for Aligning Your Organization Around Value
To define value streams and align your organization around the delivery of those value streams, you will need to engage stakeholders from across the organization.
SAFe Value Stream Workshop: The workshop is the workhorse for defining value streams in your organization. To be effective, the workshop requires both the participation of the right people — including executive sponsors, key stakeholders, and representatives from all relevant functions and levels of the organization — as well as access to the right information about current processes, the organizational structure, and the products or services being delivered.
Visual Tools: Use pen, paper, marker boards and sticky notes to list all the products and services your organization offers. Identify the key activities and processes involved in delivering each product or service. Then define the value streams by mapping the flow of value from concept to delivery for each group.
Customer Perspective: Define not just the value stream but also the end user for each product or service. Be sure to focus on the customer perspective and that all activities contribute to delivering value to the end-user. Continuously review and refine the value stream definitions to adapt to changing customer needs and market conditions.
Know Your Current Process: Identify key milestones and decision points within each value stream to help manage and track progress. Know which team members contribute to each decision point and are responsible for outcomes stemming from the decision. Know, also, which decisions should be handed off to others.
Strategic Alignment: Align value streams with the organization’s strategic goals and objectives to ensure that improvement efforts are targeted and impactful.
Encouraging ‘Value Stream Thinking’
One of the most significant obstacles organizations face when establishing a value stream-oriented structure is the resistance to breaking down organizational silos. Silos often form when people — engineers, managers, executives — focus on their individual departments or areas of responsibility, leading to a lack of collaboration and a narrow view of the organization’s overall goals.
To successfully implement value stream thinking, organizations must address this challenge head-on:
- Securing executive sponsorship is crucial, as it demonstrates the importance of the initiative and provides the necessary support for change.
- Clear communication about the benefits of value stream thinking is also essential, highlighting how it can lead to improved efficiency, better customer satisfaction, and increased profitability.
- Involving managers in the process of defining and optimizing value streams is another key strategy for overcoming resistance. By actively engaging managers and seeking their input, organizations can foster a sense of ownership and buy-in. This collaborative approach helps managers understand how their roles fit into the larger value stream and how they can contribute to the organization’s success.
- Furthermore, providing training and support to help managers adapt to the new way of working can ease the transition. This may include workshops, coaching, and mentoring programs that focus on developing cross-functional collaboration skills and a customer-centric mindset.
By establishing and defining value streams and encouraging value stream thinking among product or service stakeholders, your organization can reap the benefits of a more collaborative and customer-focused approach to understanding product and service value streams.
Connect with DMI to learn more about how we partner with organizations embarking on the SAFe journey.
