VSOptima conducted small research among value stream mapping practitioners regarding the challenges and opportunities of such a LEAN tool.
Our target groups were the Disciplined Agile community and the Value Stream Mapping group. These groups have slightly different demographics:
-
-
- The Disciplined Agile is comprised of 12,000+ members most of them are associated with Agile practice; 72 people participated in the survey;
- The Value Stream Mapping is comprised of 40,000+ members from lean, manufacturing, supply chain, and other production-related industries; 296 participated in the survey.
-
How long does it take to collect the required information to depict a value stream map?
As we can see there is a deviation between agile practitioners and lean practitioners. We could assume that it might be related to the fact that value stream mapping is a rather emerging tool among agile coaches, yet among lean practitioners, it has greater penetration and of course a long history of usage; thus people are more experienced and can do analysis faster.
Insight 1: Value Stream Practitioners need several weeks to collect the information and build a Value Stream Map
How much time do you need to validate Value Stream change Impact?
The next most interesting question we articulated the following way: given what practitioners found in a value stream map, how much time do they need on figuring out what to change, what to change to, and verify whether such a change really affects their target process parameters.
We found that the majority of agile coaches suggested that they need from 1 to 3 months to understand the impact of the change. However, lean practitioners were divided between two groups who need a month and those who need 1-3 months.
Insight 2: Value Stream Practitioners need at least a couple of months to verify a change of Value Stream.
The results of this survey clearly indicate that practitioners are lacking specialized tools to streamline Value Stream analysis and optimization. Such tools could significantly accelerate decision-making and hypothesis verification enabling business agility. An example of platform pioneering predictive analytics for Value Stream optimization could be VSOptima.
VSOptima platform offers completely free Predictive Analytics and Optimization tools to Visualize, Simulate, and Optimize your Value Stream models.
Try it out today and see how VSOptima can help you build and validate changes in your Value Stream models.