Breaking down the walls

Organize a session with teams that have dependencies to visualize the barriers and dependencies between these teams. 

• Draw the entire process on a large sheet of paper with the teams, from the customer’s idea to delivering value in the form of a product or service. Draw the various process steps and note the departments or teams needed under each step. Literally draw walls between these teams. 

• Discuss the following questions: how many walls are there? How high are the walls? Which wall causes the most trouble? 

• Discuss the dependencies between the teams. Who needs what from whom? Who waits for whom? What is the average waiting time: hours, days, or weeks? Are there any other bottlenecks in the process?

You might recognize this as a simplified form of the value stream mapping technique, often used in lean. With this simplified form, you quickly get insight into the main bottlenecks without precisely measuring the waiting and recovery times between process steps. Based on this insight, choose a bottleneck and work together on solutions. It might reveal that the way teams are organized is not helpful for faster delivery. It then takes courage to address this and propose changes. Look first for quick wins that you can implement together with other teams without much fuss. If there are, start with those.