Thursday, February 4, 2016

Value stream mapping for software projects


Eric Gunnerson
Thursday 3:20-4:20PM

Books referenced:
  • The Lean Paradox
  • User Story Mapping
  • Product Development Flow
  • The Goal
  • The Phoenix Project

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

1 comment:

  1. Here is a transcription of my awful handwriting.

    https://docs.google.com/document/d/1D8WecIKYNBpX9FGK7X9IdIJdtoq6taILYcvZd5o57rc/edit?usp=sharing

    What goes into the value stream?
    Things that deliver value
    Not the ENTIRE process
    Get more granular when there isn’t any other plan to improve
    Capture interactions/hand-offs between teams/groups/departments

    Where should I focus? How do I find the bottlenecks?
    Queueing: How big are the queues? How long does it take to get a work item through the queue?
    Kaizen newspaper: What are we going to do?

    Value Stream Map augments process flow with touch time and cycle time
    Let’s you visualize your stream to establish a shared truth
    Kaizen: The process we wish we had

    How do you create a VSM?
    Whole team collaborates to identify boxes
    Make sure that the story (card) in the system represents user value
    This will help Engineers see the whole system

    Do we have too much WIP? Not enough slack?

    What happens when the bottleneck is a people problem?
    Business process vs. Engineering Organization
    Align the work of all people who contribute to the value stream

    How do you track/compute the touch/cycle times?
    Inherent in Kanban system
    Ask people who are doing it or have done it before
    Sometimes it might be a (wide) range of values
    Assess the impact of your experiments on these time

    VSM may or may not correspond to lanes on a Kanban board
    Kanban in software visualizes inventory
    Look at WIP and variance to identify processes to improve

    VALUE stream vs. PROCESS flow
    Value stream looks at time, money, and resources
    Process flow focuses on questions like “How?” and “Where doe the time go?”

    Setup and teardown time

    How do you visualize/track defects?
    Do a separate VSM for defects? Separate process flow?
    May have “emergency services”, “all hands on deck”, or “stop the presses” workflow with separate Kanban states
    You’ll need to identify root causes to find waste

    Books and other references
    “The Lean Paradox” (a.k.a. “This is Lean: Resolving the Efficiency Paradox” by Niklas Modig and Pär Åhlström
    “User Story Mapping” by Jeff Patton and Peter Economy
    “Product Development Flow” by Donald G Reinertsen
    A dense textbook with good diagrams
    Seems to have inspired SAFe
    “The Goal” by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
    “The Phoenix Project” by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford
    Also, it might be worthwhile to look at various software products that help you do a VSM

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