VSM Part 3: Success With Value Stream Mapping

6 Tips For Success With Value Stream Mapping (Or Any Lean Process)

In part 2 of our value stream mapping series, we provided a few essential tips for getting started with VSM. Now we will focus on to how to gain traction with the concept and reach and maintain a level of success.

Mapping the flow of value provides a great opportunity for people to align themselves and their work processes.^[1] By encouraging value stream conversations and dialogues within your team, people will naturally begin to identify what they can do to improve. 

Fostering Continuous Improvement

Value stream mapping, in essence, is the process of continuous improvement. It's a constant effort to identify, eliminate, and prevent the 8 wastes of Lean from impacting the productivity of your organization. 

The 8 Wastes of Lean

Therefore, it's essential that all stakeholders, owners, and individuals related to the process are completely involved in the conversation and aligned with a desire for continuous improvement from every angle.

6 tips For creating an environment That's compatible with continuous improvement:

1. Support full and deep engagement with all team members.
   
2. Establish open communication and transparency.
   
3. Welcome and foster collaboration, innovation, value engineering, and culture development. 
4. Encourage alignment to support rapid learning – "fail-fast-early" creates change and standardization.
   
5. Develop an atmosphere where everyone is accountable and responsible to each other.
   
6. Measure and track the effectiveness of all continuous improvement efforts.

When applied diligently, these practices will begin to spawn a team-mentality where improvement and success become contagious and self-fulfilling. By applying them to an early-stage process like value stream mapping, you will have laid the foundation for their continued use, acceptance, and application further along in the Lean journey.  

IN Summary

This 3 part series demonstrates how the implementation of Lean principles, like value stream mapping, requires deep discipline, dedication, and effort. Sadly, the commonly held belief among many CM firms is that there's simply not enough time, energy, or resources to make it worth attempting these types of paradigm shifts on their own.

This is where proven and experienced end-to-end construction integration teams like NEHP can provide the necessary programs, training, and management to deliver true competitive advantages, cost and schedule savings, and construction productivity improvements.

For more information, get our construction integration and modularization fact sheet here...

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VSM Part 1 | 2 | 3

[1] Source: Fischer, M., Ashcraft, H., Reed, D., Khanzode, A., (2017). Integrating Project Delivery. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.