Value Stream Mapping FTW – Optimized Quarterly Planning

Situation:

A client working toward Scaled Agile Framework (aka SAFe) was doing quarterly planning to setup a proper release train involving 15 teams. Most of the teams were producing cloud-based services while several others were supporting them in various ways.

They had worked through several of these planning / work cycles in quarterly events with dismal results. Planning was taking far too long to produce a plan that was wildly inaccurate. Leadership had little to no confidence in successful execution.

We were asked to explore how Value Stream Mapping could not only reduce the time and effort needed to conduct quarterly planning, but also improve the accuracy of the planning process.

Obstacle(s):

• This initially came up too late in the planning process cycle to do it all properly.
• Resistance from many of the Product Managers involved who felt that things were working well as is and as such there was no need to change.
• Difficult to get time to work with Product Managers to capture their planning process and gather baseline flow metrics.

Action(s):

• Interview the Release Train Engineer to capture his thoughts about how things were going and/or how they might improve.
• Interview other Product Managers to capture their product planning process.
• Interview individual team members – especially from teams with the worst track record of delivering on commitments.
• Conduct a Gemba Walk of the various planning process stages in order to capture and then produce a current state Value Stream Map.
• Produce a formal Value Stream Map of the current start showing the whole process end to end along with the flow and other metrics involved to serve as a baseline.
• Reviewed the new Value Stream Map with leaders to show the current reality.
• Brainstorming session with those involved on what areas to improve on and formulate experiments to consider in creating a new future state.
• As a group we formalized and then executed two experiments for a quick win in early the next cycle.
  • The first addressed the Definition of Ready to ensure that proposed work could be properly evaluated by the teams. Expecting that this would improve the quality of the work described which would lead to better estimates.
  • The second focused on team inclusion in qualifying and estimating the work to be completed. Expecting this would increase the accuracy of work being committed to thus raise the delivery percentage of work delivered over committed.

Result(s):

In both experiments we observed impressive gains despite the resistance.

• While higher quality planning took Product Managers a bit longer the resulting improvements ensured that the individual teams were better informed regarding the work being described. This led to 60% increase in confidence that work committed to would actually be delivered.
• By including the technical team representatives involved in doing the work to validate the proposed work we increased buy-in at the team level by 75%. Increased awareness and engagement resulting in improved detail around omissions as well as risks & dependencies including cross-team complications. By the end of the execution cycle the percentage of deliveries increased from 24% the previous cycle to 79%.
• Teams were not overloaded with wishful thinking backlog of work. As a result, more focus and effort were applied to only what mattered so less effort was consumed thinking about things that did not matter for this cycle.

As a result of the gains realized there was a higher-level commitment within the organization to use Value Stream Mapping to explore improvements in other areas as well as expand the use of Value Stream Mapping to other functions that could stand to improve how value flowed to customers.

This early success also led to an interest in going deeper with Value Stream Management concepts along with Flow Metrics to further enhance how value flowed to customers.