Looking Where the Action Isn’t
In most business processes, work items spend more time waiting around than being worked on. Much more time. We have modelled all kinds of business processes in all kinds of organizations—start-ups, scale-ups, big enterprises, regulated industries—and time and again we find that work spends over 90% of its time blocked, waiting on people or resources, sitting in queues, stuck at process gates, or going back around the process because it was wrong the first time.
All of this is locked-in value. Imagine you could snap your fingers and the new feature was live, the sale was completed, the returned product was back in the stock room. Every day, every week, every month that this is not true is lost revenue or lost opportunity.
Business agility is not about getting better at the 10%, but at slashing the 90%! We often see teams halve the lead time of work items in the same organization with the same technology and the same constraints, just by rethinking how they structure themselves and the work.
VESPA: iterative, measurable improvement
uses a five-stage model to define and implement measurable change, time and again, which makes the acronym VESPA:
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Visualize: Make the invisible visible. Whether through Value Stream Mapping, instrumenting and monitoring automated systems, or interviewing key people, we ‘seek first to understand’ what is really there, rather than what we assume is there.
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Eliminate: Once we have a handle on the process or system, we look for any redundant or duplicate activities. What are we doing ‘because we have always done it that way’? Which steps produce output that no one cares about?
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Simplify: Everything that remains must be here for a reason. Which steps or activities can we combine, reorder, rethink, to make the process or system simpler? How could we measure that?
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Practise: Was this a one-off or is there something here we can generalize and reuse, commoditize and institutionalize? We practise, doing it again and again, until we understand its nuances and edge cases.
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Automate: As we do the thing over and over, it becomes boring: something that we do a lot and that is the same every time. At this point, it is a candidate for automation. Once we automate it, we need never think about it again! So much time freed up for other things.
VESPA is an incremental process. It does not matter how far along you get, you still improved things for yourself and for others. If you only got as far as visualizing things, you have at least made the implicit explicit. If you got to eliminate and simplify things, that will roll forward and impact everyone. Once you get to practising and automating them, then you reap the real benefits.
VESPA is also a cyclical process. When you decide you have gone as far as you want to with one cycle, you choose the next candidate for optimization. This way you are continually baselining, improving, measuring, adapting your process, so you systematically reduce time to value and increase throughput. You can also have multiple initiatives running in parallel, as long as you can measure them independently.