Playbook : Value Stream Mapping (VSM) Playbook

🌐 Purpose

To guide engineering and product teams through the practice of Value Stream Mapping - a collaborative method to visualise, understand, and improve the flow of value from idea to customer. This playbook helps teams identify delays, handoffs, and waste, and empowers them to design faster, safer, and more sustainable delivery systems.

⚖️ Principles

  • Focus on the end-to-end flow of customer value
  • Visualise the actual system, not the idealised process
  • Involve the people who do the work
  • Use data to inform, not to blame
  • Improve the system, not the individual

✅ What Good Looks Like

  • A shared understanding of how value flows across teams
  • Identification of bottlenecks, queues, and waste
  • Clear ownership of improvement opportunities
  • Measurable improvements in delivery lead time and flow
  • Repeated use of VSM to create a culture of flow thinking

📋 When to Use Value Stream Mapping

  • As part of a delivery transformation or DevOps maturity effort
  • When cycle time or lead time is increasing
  • When there’s a disconnect between delivery effort and customer value
  • To align teams on handoffs, ownership, and shared goals

🔄 Steps to Run a Value Stream Mapping Session

1. Define the Scope

  • Choose a product, service, or workflow to map (e.g., feature delivery)
  • Define start and end points (e.g., idea to live in production)

2. Assemble a Cross-Functional Team

  • Include engineers, product managers, designers, testers, and support
  • Involve people who know and perform the work

3. Map the Current State

  • List each step in the process (including wait states)
  • Capture who does what, where handoffs occur, and what tools are used
  • Annotate with timing (e.g., lead time, touch time, wait time)

4. Identify Pain Points and Waste

  • Look for delays, rework, unclear ownership, and duplicated effort
  • Capture quality issues, excessive manual steps, or unclear decisions

5. Visualise the Flow

  • Use sticky notes, Miro/Mural, or whiteboards to create the map
  • Colour-code delays, value-added steps, and bottlenecks

6. Design the Future State

  • Brainstorm improvements (e.g., automation, team alignment, WIP limits)
  • Prioritise based on impact and feasibility

7. Create an Improvement Plan

  • Assign owners to improvement actions
  • Set short-term and longer-term improvement goals
  • Embed follow-up in OKRs or team backlogs

📈 Metrics to Capture in a VSM

  • Total Lead Time
  • Value-Added Time vs. Wait Time
  • Number of Handoffs
  • % of Automated vs. Manual Steps
  • Rework or Defect Rates

⚙️ Tools & Templates

  • Collaboration: Miro, Mural, Lucidchart
  • Timing: Cycle Time Analytics (e.g., Jira, Linear)
  • Process capture: interviews, shadowing, service blueprints
  • Template: Current State Map → Pain Points → Future State Map → Action Plan

🤝 Facilitation Tips

  • Keep sessions small (6–10 people) and focused
  • Use a neutral facilitator to guide without bias
  • Timebox discussions to avoid rabbit holes
  • Focus on flow, not individual performance
  • End with clear next steps and ownership

This playbook supports:

  • Policy: Measure & Validate Value, Eliminate Waste, Outcome-Driven Development
  • Standards: Track Lead Time to Value (LTV), Reduce Cycle Time, Align Engineering with Business Outcomes

📖 Further Reading

  • "Accelerate" by Forsgren, Humble, Kim
  • "Learning to See" by Rother & Shook (Lean Enterprise Institute)
  • "Value Stream Mapping for DevOps" – IT Revolution
  • Team Topologies (for mapping value across team boundaries)
  • Flow Engineering Toolkit by SEI Digital