Many people believe that to apply Value Stream Marketing using Lean Techniques, it is about removing waste. Eliminating waste is one of the Guiding Principles of Value Stream Marketing but you must make some fundamental improvements in your marketing cycle before a pull marketing system will work. Value Stream Marketing (VSM) is about having a minimum amount of Work in Process (WIP). However, you cannot just wake up one morning and decide to do it. You cannot just remove marginal leads or work with only higher valued leads. It’s about a journey versus the decision to reduce your WIP. Managing your WIP will make you aware of many wasteful processes and as a result provide opportunity to remove them. In VSM there are four critical components that you must understand: Protect Sales, Reduce your WIP, Improve your Cycle Time and Remove waste.
Improve your Cycle Time
Improving the Marketing cycle is where the fun really begins. By protecting sales and reducing your WIP you have only made minor changes other than discovering what makes your marketing process flow. Developing your Marketing Kanban has allowed you to sort out variation and discover over and underutilized resources. Visualization of your marketing cycle has hopefully allowed you to remove some of the low hanging fruit, I actually hate that term.
Most people will have you take your Value Stream mapping Process and create your Kanban board. What I explained in the Reduce your WIP section is to create a simple flow diagram with a Kanban. Why backwards, I find most marketing people are somewhat intimidated by Lean Tools of mapping and can readily identify a Kanban board. Creating that structure and working with it to provide flow makes the transition to a Value Stream Mapping project much easier. Using the Kanban, you have created a Current State Map with the metrics you need to develop a Future State Map. The outline I use for creating a future state:
In the book,Value Stream Mapping for Lean Development: A How-To Guide for Streamlining Time to Market, Drew Locher explained how to create a Future State Map by utilizing seven basic questions:
- What does the customer really need?
- How often will we check our performance to customer needs?
- Which steps create value and which steps are waste?
- How can we flow work with fewer interruptions?
- How do we control work between interruptions, and how will work be triggered and prioritized?
- How will we level the workload and/or different activities?
- What process improvements will be necessary?
Drew goes on to conclude that future state mapping is not a brainstorming session. He likes to use a key ground rule of 70%. If the team believes that they have a 70% chance of implementing a particular idea in less than one year, it could be included as part of the future state. If it is longer, the entire improvement effort would suffer. These specific improvement efforts will be depicted in a value stream map by the use of a Kaizen Burst icon.
When considering how to use value stream mapping in the marketing process I think the seven questions provide an excellent base for walking through the process. You have to remember, you already have a current state map drawn. In essence what you are trying to do is to move not only current state to future state but from an internal perspective to an external perspective. Your customer should be determining your value stream.
I believe this is the best way to improve your marketing cycle. Taking each channel or swim lane on your Kanban board one at a time and mapping the process will give you the best results. After creating the Future State Map move the process back to the Kanban board for execution.
Related Posts:
Value Stream Marketing – Reduce your Work in Process