Value Stream Mapping to Improve Product Delivery at the ATO

Identify bottlenecks to ensure faster product development

The Situation

Business Owners for a major program concerned that their product’s features weren’t making their target release timeframe they had communicated and committed to external users.

This major program transitioned from traditional project management to agile product management over the course of two years. In the course of this transformation, they now had a better understanding of demand management, prioritisation based on customer value and were starting to optimise the flow of work from idea through to release.

Improvements in transparency showed flaws in existing development frameworks

Many legacy practices, processes and methodologies from project management were still in use. The transparency created through the shift to product management highlighted a number of issues.

Features were being developed in silos with many handoffs between teams.
Wait-time for senior executive endorsement before the next part of the feature was worked on.
Handoffs increased delivery time.
Stakeholders presented features too late to be sufficiently refined to be included in the next Planning Interval (PI) of 3-months.
Continued use of mandatory ‘requirements’ created a lack of understanding of how the product roadmap informed the sequencing of work and thus dependencies.

The Solution

Mapping the value stream

Business Owners asked ZXM to investigate the feature readiness process and make recommendations on how it could be improved. We took a systems thinking approach and looked at waiting-time impacts to the flow of value through the system. ZXM also identified where work was being done in isolation and how this resulted in silos optimising for their own work without understanding the downstream impacts and pressures to finalise features to be ready for agile teams to deliver.

Over the course of a PI, ZXM mapped the value stream. This involved:

Reviewing team and whole of value stream processes: what were the steps from idea to release of value and the activities done at a step before the feature could move to the next step?
Quantifying the size of the batch of features at each step: were there 3, 4 or more features being worked on at a time?
Measuring the time to process the batch, i.e., cycle time in days at each step. How many weeks was it taking to process the entire batch?

Very quickly, the steps in the value stream that were likely bottlenecks became clear. While traditional logic would suggest that adding more people to teams would make product development faster, it was clear that this only comprised approximately 5% of the total time. Addressing upstream and downstream activities would be critical to improving time to value and ensuring that forecasts were accurate.

ZXM consultants then mapped all the other key product verticals across the ATO and compared this value steam to the process and patterns used by other value streams.

Identifying and addressing bottlenecks

To address the issues uncovered in the review, ZXM coaches worked closely with product management, release train engineers, architects, and business owners. The activities to address the bottleneck and concerns included:

Communicating that timeline dates and the process is not linear and need to be delivered earlier than the final cut off for feature inclusion
Utilising business scope in feature briefs to identify and plan sequencing and order of feature writing
Developing a pipeline team across solution design, business and SMEs to work collaboratively and iteratively on features
Endorsing feature once all parts have been completed to prevent rework and need to regain approval if feature was split into smaller features
Delivering feature briefings to be conducted to discuss scope before starting to write the feature and identify feature slicing
Leveraging patterns from other programs to decrease time taken to develop solutions
Working with peers in other programs to help upskill capabilities in solution design team
Ensuring that solutions focused on business problems and on business outcomes
Developing a product roadmap to make features transparent to all stakeholders involved
Ensure transparency of prioritisation process based on value to all Business Owners and stakeholders
Feedback loop to business if features targeted for next release are at risk and why

The Results

Improved Transparency of Lead Time

The value stream mapping exercise highlighted that on average features took 4-6 weeks from idea through to being ready for a PI if the feature was “in pattern” and intentional design could be used. For solutions that were novel or new thinking, the lead time could be up to three to six months.

Improved Transparency of Waste

This exercise also highlighted duplication and waste and where processes could be streamlined. For instance, if a feature was broken down or split into smaller features or there was minor wording changes, then business owners required features to be re-approved. This added 1-2 months.

The transparency of the impact of these practices provided product management the opportunity to then shift feature endorsement upstream, elicit input from business owners on strategic alignment, and then allow features to be refined, and broken down, continuously as the PI boundary approached.

Improved Streamlined Process

Those value streams that adopted the new streamlined process were able to reduce their cycle time over the course of the following six months. Product management saw the flow of features improve and enabled them to assess incoming features and other demand signals each week rather than all the features being presented for consideration in the final few weeks before PI Planning.

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