Are you Fumbling thru your Value Stream

In a Value Stream Mapping Process, one of the metrics used is what is called percent complete and accurate. It is a way of measuring the quality of hand-offs inside the value stream. You get a sense of the rework or work not completed that is being transferred from one stage to the next.

Six Sigma defines this area as a tollgate review and in Kanban it is very similar to the Queuing stage or the “To Do” stage. No matter what you call it, it may be your biggest inhibitor to flow.

Jim Luckman in a recent podcast stated, “These hand-offs are usually a very big problem because if you’re not paying attention to the quality of the hand-offs, then the information will be worked on. All of that work will be of waste, and it has to be redone. So, paying attention to the quality of the hand-off with this percent complete and accurate is a real key metric that needs to be looked at in creating a future state value stream.”

How to define a poor hand-off:

No clear ownership of the hand-off: This is evident with the famous saying “That‘s not my job”.
Rework: This problem can be easily disguised from one hand-off to another. Someone with experience on either side of the hand-off can “make it work”.
Control Freaks: We talk about them but little is typically done. It is an efficient way to get things done. They become readily apparent when just about all your activities come together at a single person or department.
Too many unusual situations: If everything is a special, it becomes a standard! This could be a result of a complex chain of command, lack of employee empowerment, poorly defined procedures or the preceding hand-off was bad (my favorite).
Too many hand-offs: You will notice this almost immediately in the mapping process as there may be single tasks being mapped and handed off back and forth between people and departments.
Value/Non-value Ratios: Your time (Value) to complete a series of steps may not take any time at all an hour or two. However, the process takes a day or two to complete (Non-value). This is common when one or two steps in the process must wait for another to be completed.
Poor utilization of reports: In Six Sigma, it is the tollgate review, in Lean it may be Standard Work, in many organizations it is just a checklist, in others, there may be no documentation at all and in others it may be excessive.

When you have problems with the hand-off most people will attempt to fix it. However, without having knowledge of the entire value system their fix could decrease or even incapacitate the entire system. It is important to identify problems but I would advocate avoiding the temptation to fix each problem as soon as it is identified. Many of the problems identified will turn out to be merely symptoms of underlying systemic problems.

An older book on the subject that I used as reference for this article, Dominating Markets with Value: Advances in Customer Value Management