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Scheduling a phone interview with applicant Conducting a phone interview with applicant Scheduling a person-to-person interview with applicant Conducting a person-to-person interview with applicant Making a hiring decision about the applicant Each activity occurs in a new hire value stream that produces value in the form of hired employees. Each has a specific order in which it must occur. The application screening and phone interviews add incremental value because they assist to improve the quality of candidates selected for the person-to-person interviews. There are hundreds if not thousands of value streams within any office environment. Some are aligned with the flow of paper, others are not. Launching a new product development effort or marketing program are examples of value streams that do not have structured paper flows, but they are value streams none-the-less. In these examples the value streams are associated with the flow of an information from one activity to the next, as each activity adds substance and form to the information. Top
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of a value stream as it might appear at some point in the future. Some organizations attempt to skip mapping a current state and move directly to the future state. They say they don't want to waste time on something they know is broken. However, the current state should be clearly understood prior to looking for future areas of improvement. Organizations are complex systems. Without a current state view to use as a baseline it is sometimes difficult to tell if a change actually is an improvement. Or if the change made to improve one area has been made at the sacrifice of the performance of another. Also having a current state map helps to create an accurate transition plan from the current to the future state. Developing a future state value stream, as part of the implementation planning process, helps to insure that the planned changes will produce the desired improvements. It helps to enforce a discipline of thinking through the impacts of any change. The butterfly flapping its wings in China may have an impact on the rainfall in Seattle. But it is more likely that changing how a sales order is entered will impact on how orders are taken. Top
6. Why create value stream maps of a future state not an ideal state?
There is sometimes a tendency to build future state value stream maps to be the ideal, nearly perfect, end objective. Under this scenario a current state model is developed to establish where the organization is. Sometimes called the as-is model. Then a future state model is developed as the ideal future goal. This is sometimes called the to-be model. Then a gap analysis is performed between the two. The gap or difference of the two models forms the basis for a project to reach this perfect future state. The truth of the matter is there is no such thing as an ideal future state. Even if it did exist for an instant, an instant later the ideal state would change - because of a new customer, a new competitor, a new employee, etc. All organizations are in a constant flux of change over time, whether they recognize it or not. Adopting a culture of continuous improvement is the only effective choice for maintaining a high performance organization. This is not to say that future state mapping should not be conducted. The Agile & Lean approach is to: Map the current state Look for incremental opportunities to improve Map how the future state would look with these incremental changes Make the incremental improvements Rename the future state map to the current state map Let the system quiet down to a new equilibrium to be able to measure the true impacts of change Then start the cycle again and look for incremental opportunities to improve After a couple of cycles, improvements that would have been impossible to achieve when starting from the original current state map, will present themselves as viable alternatives. Innovations that would not have been considered using a single big bang project approach. Top
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