Value Stream Maps in PD

I'm going to say something radical today: Most time spent on value stream mapping (VSM) in product development is waste. I saw an example of that come across my desk today: a beautiful VSM that a team had obviously spent a lot of time on - that told me absolutely nothing about the biggest things getting in the way of their product development performance.

Doing VSM in many product development organizations is like doing a three day kaizen event in a factory where the critical machine in the process is out of oil. I don't need a sophisticated tool, the whole production team or an entire day to see what the immediate problem is and recommend a solution: "Get some oil in the darned machine and put some changes in place to keep it from happening again!" If I took the analysis any further without fixing the obvious things first, the data I collected would only reflect the system as it runs while the critical machine is out of oil.

As a deeply experienced product development consultant, I've learned how to spot the "critical machines" and identify the problems that tend to get them backed up. I am remiss in my responsibilities if I insist upon leading my clients through any complex diagnostic tool when they've got something obvious that's clearly holding them back. That may meet my need for more personal involvement (and therefore more billing opportunities) but it doesn't meet my clients' need to achieve higher performance as expeditiously as possible.

I rarely encounter an organization that is truely clueless about the biggest barriers that keep them stuck at their current level of performance. Finding the issues is the easy part. It's harder to prioritize the challenges, and to identify solutions that will create sustainable high performance, and stick beyond the pilot program. That's where I have the opportunity to add the most value, and so that is where I focus.