Kanban: Value stream mapping

One of the key principles of Kanban is to ‘start with what you do now’, this is usually enabled by visualising your current work flow, this is where value stream mapping can help.

Value stream mapping helps you show the flow of work through your existing process which should let you identify areas of waste or delay and even potential bottlenecks. With this visual representation it’s easier to understand and assess which parts add value or not.

Other benefits of value stream mapping include eliminating waste, better team communication and where there are multiple teams across a workflow process it will enable a holistic view with dependencies and hand-offs showing.

To create your value stream map, you should invite key people that work across all the areas of the process you want to visualise, then get some big whiteboards or large sheets of paper on a wall and start adding each step in the process using a high-level name.

Let’s look at an example using a pizza shop. First the customer will enter the shop and look at the menu, they will then place an order at the counter and pay, this will then be placed in a queue for the kitchen staff to work on, the kitchen staff will pick the order and make the pizza before putting it in the oven to bake, once baked the pizza will be cut into slices and placed in a box and finally this will be given to the customer.

Here is how we could represent this process as a value stream map:

From this we could make our Kanban board:

On our Kanban board we chose to not represent the customer entering the shop and viewing the menu, but it was important to understand the full end to end flow in the value stream map.

Now we have our process visualised and our Kanban board created we should start to gather metrics so we can start to improve the process over time.