VSM (Value Stream Mapping) to help System Thinking

Hi guys, in this post I want to share with you an excellent story that happened several months ago with one of my teams, for that I will explain how to use VSM (Value Stream Mapping) as a tool to help System Thinking.

At that time I had a team that was making the first steps towards Agile. They were a fantastic team, keen to learn but still with the “old waterfall” mentality. They had a typical approach where the developers did development work and the testers – testing, not a truly Agile team.

I believe this is a common problem for teams that are switching to Agile: seeing only a small picture, they are not able to understand the entire system. I believe they lacked “System Thinking”. But what is “System Thinking”?

Shortly explained, “System Thinking” is the ability to see the “big picture” and not to be focused on just a small part of your job. For a better explanation, I will use as an example my former team to demonstrate my ideas.

In that particular team, the work was arranged so that the developers had a set of User stories to work on. A finished User story was passed over to the testers for testing. The problem was that although for the developers these stories were quite simple to implement, they were quite challenging for testing because of several compatibility issues that required full allocation of testing resources.

When developers ran out of User stories, they were asking the Product Owner for more stories to work on. However, the PO acted rationally and did not give them any new stories until the team delivered everything to the iteration backlog. It was obvious that the team needed some help to visualise everything that was happening. How to help the team?

Clearly, the developers had their best intentions in mind: they ran out of work. Therefore, they asked for more tasks.