In search of value stream architects
Lately I have been spending most of my time at the gemba looking at value-creating processes in organizations very far from manufacturing. And the farther I go -- for example, all the way into healthcare -- the more I find myself asking: "Who originally designed this useless, incapable, unavailable, inadequate, inflexible, uneven and disconnected value stream? And who is responsible for its performance now?" The answer, in most cases, is that usual suspect: Nobody.
To be fair to those readers in the service sector, I should note that process awareness and process thinking - note that I use the terms "process" and "value stream" interchangeably -- are inherently easier in the factory. The product is there for everyone to see, and the departments and the industrial, manufacturing and production engineering professional groups are all in the same place. In addition, virtually every manufacturing company periodically introduces fundamentally new products, involving at least some new production methods, which offer the opportunity to rethink the entire value stream. The proof that these value streams are the easiest to transform is that process awareness declines rapidly in manufacturing companies once the shop floor with its physical transformations is lost from view. Product development, sales, purchasing, human resources and finance are processes -- a series of actions that must be performed correctly at the right time and in the right sequence to create the value that customers need. Yet the design of these value streams often receives little or no attention, even in companies that have become quite proficient at mapping and then redesigning the value streams of their factories.
And if your task is managing customer support at a bank, or claims adjustment at an insurance company, or patient flow in a hospital, there is a good chance that you will need to fundamentally rethink a value stream that was never designed in any rigorous way and for which no one has clear responsibility. Many of these processes apparently just happened and have continued to run for years or decades, so that the deficient current situation seems sanctioned in some way by history. "It has always been this way. But we are smart and we work around the problems every day."
What is missing here is what I call the value stream architect. This is the person, ideally a line manager who receives a special assignment, whose task is to take responsibility for fundamentally rethinking an existing value stream to create a lean value-adding process. (This may be primarily a value stream that relates directly to the customer, such as product development or managing order to delivery, or a support stream needed to operate some primary stream.) The first step is to determine the customer’s need and the type of process needed to meet it. Next, the value stream can be mapped by walking it with everyone who touches it, and the current situation can be determined together with the gap in meeting the customer’s need while allowing the organization to prosper. This analysis will suggest potential improvements, and the architect then works to reach a consensus on the best alternative to pursue, followed by experiments using the familiar Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle to determine whether the alternative works.
I like the term architect because in its conventional use it refers to a person who talks with clients to determine their needs for a building and who also talks with all the participants involved in design and construction (at least the engineer and contractor) to create a process that will deliver the desired value. The difference, of course, is that traditional architects are creating buildings, while value stream architects are creating coherent lean processes.
All this sounds complicated, and it is. Most organizations treat process improvement as a staff (or consultant) activity at isolated points along broad value streams, and often without asking what really matters to the customer or the implications for the whole organization. As a result, the most important processes -- those that flow across the organization -- are often not addressed, and even when they are, the improved process cannot be sustained, since the new process is not understood by line managers who do not see maintaining and improving the entire value stream as their responsibility. (This points to the need to designate a value stream manager for each process, once it has been transformed, to continuously monitor the performance of the value stream and improve it regularly through kaizen.)
If only the Lean Community could simply draw on the practice of Toyota or Honda in pursuing the architecture of lean processes. But I fear it cannot. I have asked many questions, but I have not found any clarity about the way in which these organizations design robust lean value streams for their value-creating activities outside the factory. And, in any case, the great majority of the world’s processes take place in organizations far removed from manufacturing. So I believe we are basically on our own as lean thinking continues to spread far beyond its initial point of origin.
What we need now are experiments in many sectors, so as to make value stream architecture a core skill of line management. And I am hoping that members of the Lean Community will lead the way and share their experimental findings. In fact, we are hoping to examine these experiments as part of LEI’s new lean management initiative and to share our conclusions about promising approaches. (If you have experiences to share, I hope you will send them to Chet Marchwinski, who prepares our "success stories" for our website at www.lean.org.)
To mention one example of the kind of experimentation needed, my longtime co-author, Dan Jones, and his collaborators have been working with several healthcare organizations in the United Kingdom to create value stream architects aimed at transforming patient flow throughout the hospital. This end-to-end process is particularly challenging because the many steps involved, from admission to discharge, have never been treated as a connected activity and -- in the few cases where they have been -- neither the patients’ needs nor the organizational ones have been clearly specified.
Dan recently asked his collaborators, Marc Baker and Ian Taylor, to describe their approach in a workbook, Making Hospitals Work, and I hope Lean Community members in all sectors will find it interesting. In reviewing their work, I found it particularly important that the authors embedded value stream redesign in an A3 analysis to focus on the needs of the patient and the organization before tackling patient flow. And their discussion is truly thought-provoking regarding the role of the value stream manager (the term they use, instead of architect) and his or her key contribution as the cross-departmental, horizontal force for transformation in a vertical organization.
Every sector and organization is different and will need many experiments in the years ahead to make everything work. In fact, I believe that systematic experimentation to identify the best way for lean managers to create lean value streams for every process in every sector is the most important task the Lean Community faces.
