The first mover advantage has never been felt more strongly than it is today. Organizations are under pressure to launch new products, services and features, and to do so before their competition gets a foot through the door with their customers.
You will have seen examples of this across the board – ride hailing apps bringing in new features that their competitors rush to adapt; stores starting home delivery services, with other stores following along; entirely new businesses being followed by a series of copycats at the first sign of success… The list goes on.
While the customer value of these new products, services and features can be debated, a new or established business – large, mid-sized or small – can always take strong steps to improve their time-to-market.
Two approaches tend to be rather popular across industries today – the Theory of Constraints, and Value Stream Mapping – and a combination of these approaches can enable a business to up their pace substantially.
Value Stream Mapping helps organizations understand how they deliver value to their customers by mapping out the flow through which the end-product reaches the customer.
While the idea seems simple, the difficulty in mapping out a Value Stream increases with various factors: the size of an organization, its complexity, the number of hand offs, priorities, and more.
The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®) makes an interesting observation, where the time between steps is often the biggest source of waste. Considering that SAFe® leverages several principles from Lean, the observation regarding waste is on target.
Source: scaledagileframework.com/organizational-agility
The Theory of Constraints, on the other hand, drives a process improvement technique that targets constraints or bottlenecks in the flow of work.
The outcome of continuous improvement and resolving issues in the flow of work can be amplified significantly by putting the focus on the weakest link in the chain, rather than on the most visible issues.
This weak link can be an inefficient process, an understaffed team, limited availability of specialized skills or an assortment of other issues.
Source: depositphotos.com
Combining Value Stream Mapping and the Theory of Constraints can draw out quick wins that have the potential to substantially improve an organization's time-to-market.
Successful longer-term efforts based on findings from these combined techniques can up the pace even further and help an organization reach potential customers sooner than its competition.
Coucal can help your organization towards improving your time-to-market through Value Stream Mapping workshops that can map out how your organization delivers value, and help highlight constraints. An expert selection of techniques that can be tailored to suit your organization can help in easing or resolving these constraints.
Leaders, Product Managers/Owners and teams can leverage customized workshops that zoom-in or zoom-out to let all levels in your organization focus on delivering value faster to your customers.
At Coucal, our approach to delivering value is helping our customers achieve outcomes over outputs. Along with the outcomes from the workshops, we provide a toolbox of practices and techniques that ensure you and your organization can continue working towards successfully and quickly delivering value to your customers.
Connect with our experts to set up a workshop that suits your needs.
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