Value Stream Mapping in Agile Business Analysis
- Nilay Kamar
- Jan 24, 2022
- 4 min read
Updated: Jun 20, 2024
There are many techniques that business analysis practitioners use to understand business needs well in an agile world. As a business analyst who has been working on a large-scale company for about 4-years, I always try new approaches to regular problems. It has been a good way to apply new methods to solve pain points and identify solutions. In this story, let’s take a look at how Value Stream Mapping(VSM) works on complex processes with an example of Garanti BBVA. In this article, you can find my experience in the following subjects about VSM:
What is VSM? and what it aims to achieve?
Which steps should be applied for VSM?
How we did use VSM in agile business analysis?
What we did gain in our project with VSM?
What is VSM? and what it aims to achieve?
Value Stream Mapping is a part of the lean approach and aims to eliminate all steps that have no added value to complete the job entirely. Since the main objective is eliminating the waste on processes, it can be applied in different sectors from production to software systems. According to VSM, all steps should have value and move you to the next phase in the journey. If any step does not forward you to the next, it’s a waste of your process and you should eliminate it.
Which steps should be applied for VSM?
In the preparation stage, it should be identified the process selected to solve its pain points and assign to a VSM owner who is an expert of the given domain. The next step is to create the current state to form the future state -while the current state refers to the process is now, the future state refers to the process wanted to be reached out-. To determine the current state, a linear process diagram is drawn that shows all steps required to complete the entire. (Your diagram shouldn’t have several if-else-then steps in this stage because your goal is to eliminate wastes in a single process. After all, you’re applying a part of the lean approach.) Time is one of the most important parts of VSM so the time required to complete a single step and waiting time between two consecutive steps are measured and identified in this diagram. All information flow should also be defined clearly in the diagram.
In analyzing the current state, wastes should be identified to eliminate. Some metrics are used in analyzing VSM such as lead time, process time, idle time, and activity ratio. Cycle time is the time required to complete a single step. The sum of cycle times is process time, in other words, has added value to the entire process. The sum of waiting times is idle time and lead time refers to the time from the beginning of order to the end. According to VSM, we can name idle time as a waste and the goal is to maximize the value-added while minimizing the wastes. At the end of the study, you should get a perfect value stream with minimum wastes.
After wastes have been identified to eliminate, the future state should be created by evaluating VSM metrics. Finally, you’re ready to implement your improvement plan for your selected process!
How we did use VSM in agile business analysis?
In our project, we wanted to simplify the credit evaluation process for Garanti BBVA Factoring, everyone known as credit evaluation is a complex financial process that has many steps and includes different departments to complete the whole. We started with understanding the core concepts of the credit process as an agile team. The first rule is to know your customer and its process!
After many meetings with different process owners, we pictured the process step by step and specified the value-added. The current state was drawn as a diagram and shared with stakeholders at the end of the first phase.
In daily life, many of us have to do redundant clicks on the screens many times. Even if just clicking a button, if it’s redundant, has no added value to the process, or be able to automate, it shouldn’t be in there according to VSM. As the second phase, we assessed buttons, screens, and steps at all points with process owners together. While assessing, durations helped to identify whether a step is a waste/bottleneck, because we don’t want to wait needlessly. In the end, we converted the current diagram to the future diagram to get a better stream. The future diagram was a key analysis to get use cases in our sprint plannings.
What we did gain in our project with VSM?
VSM helps us to see the entire process in the big picture, and also it provides an alignment about the whole between stakeholders. On the other hand, bottlenecks and wastes can be identified easily with a current diagram. Besides many advantages of VSM, it can be said as a disadvantage that non-linear process isn’t suitable for VSM because of complexity.
In summary, we used Agile Extension to BABOK Guide for understanding concepts of VSM. For more information about VSM and other techniques, you can review that extension. See you in another project with another technique!
Feel free for any questions about VSM to me!
You can also read this article from my medium account.
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