3.3. Interaction Narrative: Value Streams in Motion (Illustrating Real Workflows)

💡 First Principle: Value is not created by a single practice, but by a series of interconnected activities and practices working in concert to respond to a specific demand or opportunity.

Scenario: An organization maps out its process for handling a new user request. They discover that the request passes through five different teams, with long delays at each handoff. By visualizing this value stream, they can apply the "Keep It Simple and Practical" and "Optimize and Automate" principles to streamline the flow and dramatically reduce fulfillment time.

Value streams are a series of steps an organization takes to create and deliver products and services for a specific consumer or scenario. They are combinations of SVC activities and practices. Understanding value streams in practice helps you see how work actually flows and where improvements can be made. Mapping value streams in your own organization helps you visualize this flow, identify bottlenecks, reduce waste (applying the "Keep It Simple and Practical" principle), and find opportunities for optimization and automation ("Optimize and Automate"). This is a key activity for improving professional practice.

We will explore two common examples below.