Archive for Value Stream Mapping
Businesses that Die, Die of confusion
Posted by: | CommentsSo to survive, you must prevent confusion? Bill Dettmer of Goal Systems International, Theory of Constraints Expert and upcoming podcast guest recommended a book to me about Systems Thinking. It was Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why
It caused me more reflection than any book has in years. One of the particular areas that Laurence described in the book is this state of confusion or of being lost. He said:
Research suggests five general stages in the process of person goes through when lost.
- In the first, you deny that you disorientated and press on with growing urgency, attempting to make your mental map fit what you see.
- In the next stage as you realize that you genuinely lost, the urgency blossoms into a full scale survival emergency. Clear thought becomes impossible and action because frankly, unproductive, even dangerous.
- In the third stage (usually following injury or exhaustion), you expend the chemicals of emotion and form a strategy for finding some place that matches the mental map. (It is a misguided strategy, for there is no such place now: you are lost.)
- In the fourth stage, you deteriorate both rationally and emotionally, as a strategy falls to resolve the conflict.
- In the final stage, as you run out of options and energy, you must become resigned to your plight. Like it or not you must make a new mental map of where you are. You must become Robertson Crusoe or you will die. To survive, you must find yourself. Then it won’t matter where you are.
Psychologists who study the behavior of people, who get lost, report that very few ever backtrack. Though, that is the most reasonable and successful way to survive. Even staying exactly where you are is more prudent than blazing a path forward. However our eyes look forward into real or imagined worlds. The typical impulse of people that become loss is to panic. Why? It is because of the lack of a mental map that matches the environment they are in. If you had a mental map of where you just came from, you would simply turn around and go back to where you started.
Are you thinking recovery is just around the corner? Are things taking longer than expected? Are you scrambling for the next great idea? Is innovation panic? I question sometimes whether innovation is really the strategy for companies to survive during recessionary times. Instituting new mental maps, products or services may make things progressively more unfamiliar and mixed up.
Innovation may not be the key. Scott Berkun in his book Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management (Theory in Practice (O’Reilly))
-
- Calm down: Nothing makes a situation worse than basing your actions on fear, anger, or frustration.
- Evaluate the problem in relation to the project: Just because someone else thinks the sky has fallen doesn’t mean that it has. Is this really a problem at all? Whose problem is it?
- Calm down again: Now that you know something about the problem, you might really get upset (“How could those idiots let happen!?”).
- Get the right people in the room: Any major problem won’t impact you alone. Identify who else is most responsible, knowledgeable, and useful and get them in together straight away.
- Explore alternatives: After answering any questions and clarifying the situation, figure out what your options are.
- Make the simplest plan: Weigh the options, pick the best choice, and make a simple plan. The best available choice is the best available choice, no matter how much it sucks (a crisis is not the time for idealism). The more urgent the issue, the simpler your plan.
- Execute: Make it happen.
- Debrief: After the fire is out, get the right people in the room and generate a list of lessons learned.
Though Scott’s plan is not a cure-all, it emphasizes the need to stay calm and build simple plans. One of the most effective strategies you can do is build value stream maps. Not for the typical Lean reasons or reducing waste but to create a current state map or a mental model for where you are today. I cannot emphasize enough the ability to accept where you are, what resources you have and if you know how you got here, you may be just fine in understanding how to survive.
As Laurence Gonzales states, “If we persist in bending the map until we can no longer deny the evidence of our senses, it can be terrifying. It’s not something that happens immediately. First it’s a sense of disorientation: “I’m not in Kansas anymore. “ Then the words start to become strange, landmarks are no longer familiar.” Do you need innovation to survive? It is one thing if you an innovative company already and have an existing mental map. It is quite another, if one does not exist. You may wake up and find out you’re not in Kansas anymore!
Related Posts:
The Perfect Storm has come together of Excess Capacity and Product Variety
Can you Master Continuous Improvement?
Removing Uncertainy in your Decision Making
Providing Clarity to your Marketing Process
Do you wanna turn your office into an idea factory?
Posted by: | CommentsMost continuous improvement efforts and most notably Lean are influenced heavily by the power of visualization. In fact, the post-it-note and a roll of butcher paper may be the two most important tools that you can have. Even computers are trying to jump into the fray like the iPad. ;)
Graphics, Sticky notes, Mapping and napkins are becoming back in vogue, just review the recent editions of a few of the most recent management books:
The Back of the Napkin (Expanded Edition): Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
Visual Meetings: How Graphics, Sticky Notes and Idea Mapping Can Transform Group Productivity
…and there are quite a bit more.
Visual thinking has always been a big part of my thinking from Mindmaps, Value Stream Maps, Kanban, User Stories, etc. One of the older techniques that I ran across in discussion with Bill Dettmer, an upcoming podcast guest was Brainpower Networking Using the Crawford Slip Method
Invented in the 1920s by Dr. C.C. Crawford, Professor of Education at the University of Southern California, the method simply involves collating input from people on slips of paper, nowadays we often use Post-It Notes® or butcher paper for idea generation or mapping projects. I have huge bulleting boards and white boards in my office to facilitate idea generation. Not only does this help you generate a wide variety of solutions, it also helps people get involved and feel that their contributions are valued.
I ran across this video today on twitter,thanks to @igniter that I have not realized existed.
Do you wanna turn your office into an idea factory?
P.S. As Dr. Galsworth once told me…”If your not Visual, your not Lean!”
Related Posts:
Lean Six Sigma Storyboard
Value Stream Mapping Workshop
Marketing Kanban:
Be Productive, Be Visual
Be Productive, Be Visual, Part 2
Start your Visual Thinking Process with Mind Mapping
Power of Visual Thinking in your Visual Workplace
BTW: I have no affiliation with IdeaPaint, I just thought it was a cool product. Click on the link to see their website it is FUN!!
Business901 Programs for the Month of August
Posted by: | CommentsHow Good are you at Marketing Yourself?
Marketing your Black Belt: Every 2 weeks on Friday. Marketing your Black Belt is based specifically on addressing these issues: Customer Acquisition, Marketing, Customer Retention and Communication & Collaboration.
Get Clients NOW – 28 Day Program: Program starting on first Monday of every month: 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM (GMT-0500).Program Structure and Agenda: During the first three sessions you will receive all the tools and training needed to design your individual 28-day marketing action plan. The listing above is the starting date for the program. You have signed up to start on that Monday this listed and for the following 28 days.
Lean Marketing Assessment: First Wednesday of every month. This program will allow participants to gain a clear snapshot of their present marketing conditions and practices. The participants can use the assessment to determine areas in need of improvement and develop a plan accordingly.
Value Stream Marketing: Thursday, August 12, 2010 from 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM (ET) (New). We want our participants to learn how to utilize a Sales and Marketing Value Stream through the use of a Marketing Kanban.
How many times has a good idea failed because of a poor plan or execution? For start-ups and established organizations alike, Business901 provides effective but easy to use methodologies. It is flexible enough to allow you to apply your own ideas, while giving you guidance before, during and after. We will provide practical, information-rich, immediately applicable direction that can have immediate impacts on the success of small and mid-sized businesses. Our experience includes numerous start-ups, several turnarounds in variety of industries to include manufacturing, retail, and professional services to include marketing.
Visit the individual webinar pages for additional details
P.S. Ask for details about our Achieving Expert Status Program
Providing Clarity to your Marketing Process
Posted by: | CommentsOne purpose of Value Stream Marketing is to provide clarity to an individual or organizations marketing process. This gives you the ability to walk a prospect through the process, understanding where they are at in the process. Typically, I have a customer add the activities or in lean terms map the process he uses to gain a customer. It should mimic the path a customer makes in his decision process. However, don’t look at this as just a simple exercise for a small organization. I use this in larger organizations by just repeating this process for each sales channel they may have. The secret to this is that it really forces you to layout your marketing process and is really the beginning of development of transferring your marketing into a process.
The purpose in creating your Value Stream is to achieve better cooperation of the multiple phases. Each interlinking phase depends upon the other links. In each of them, you will have different capabilities, normal variation and a changing workload making it practically impossible to balance. (You will often find that the Value stream is dependent upon the cooperation of all phases and as a result it highlights the strength of your handoffs. I have often found that in many organizations the individual steps or phases of the value stream are quite good but the quality of the handoffs is where the problems occur).
Many organizations do not look at their sales and marketing process in a
linear fashion, let alone segmenting it. When organizations first map out the process, they look at connections where people come from being all over the map such as the diagram to the right. They look at a simple linear process as an oversimplification of reality.
Not everybody goes through each step of the cycle. Some will skip from step one to step three. Someone may enter the cycle in step three. These interconnections are not trivial, it is what makes your process work and it also may be stopping it from working. So what is the purpose? The purpose of creating your Value Stream is very simple: Which is harder to manage, the above diagram or the next one?
(The Post-it notes represent a tactic such as a webinar, newsletter, financing, sales calls, etc.)
Your flow system, your Value Stream will allow an organization to operate at maximum efficiency. The secret in creating such a linear flow is segmentation. Without it, you will continue to operate in less than an optimum manner. Keep segmenting your list, till you gain a linear flow. Yes, there may be a few exceptions.
This is a simplified version of how a Value Stream would look. As you can see the natural progression of the flow (Involve, Interaction, Influence… flow to the right), the enablers or information to move the process forward is provided above each step. Taking a group of current customers, you can identify this in your current process. If this seems difficult, make a certain group that you can segment and document the process. Many companies will find huge gaps in their processes, which are supported by other departments such as sales or service or maybe by repetitive marketing.
Creating a horizontal segment/swim lane for each of your marketing channels will allow you to not only create your value stream but also serve as a basis for your Marketing Kanban and execution of your marketing process.
Related Posts:
Marketing Kanban Category
Don’t Market Without Your Kanban
Value Stream Marketing Category
