How does VSM impact culture?
One of the biggest benefits of VSM is the impact on culture, as it legitimises multiple teams and departments working closely together to focus on the flow. This leads to continuous improvement across the board and a marked shift from project to product thinking. Where VSM has been most transformational is when it’s leveraged to make ongoing change – from speed and quality to efficiency and performance.
Here are a few key considerations when it comes to VSM and your corporate culture:
Stakeholder buy-in
For this to take off, VSM cannot be the purview of one team or department, as the majority of delays you will find will straddle teams or departments. Stakeholders should come from across the value delivery chain. Lots of wide-scale projects like VSM don’t succeed because there isn’t widespread support. As you roll-out your initiative, make sure you continue to collaborate, inviting people in and demonstrating how VSM creates value for your customers.
Supporting cross-functional teams:
By making a clear connection between work and the business’s goals – rather than the priorities of individual teams or departments – VSM helps support the existence of cross-functional teams. Once silos are removed, and the inefficiency that comes with them, IT teams can pull from all available people and resources to deliver the most value, rather than whatever is most convenient.
Increased collaboration
A more collaborative culture is a cornerstone of an agile, lean organisation. VSM helps align everyone around common goals, ensuring they see the value of their work, such as a single user story, towards achieving those goals. With more visibility into what other IT teams are doing and better communication, they can understand how their work impacts others, and collaborate accordingly.
Facing resistance
Culture is key to successful transformation, but making big change can be tricky. Your enthusiasm for VSM might be met with reluctance, resistance, or indifference. Some won’t see the benefit or relevance that VSM will bring to their work, but don’t sideline these people. VSM is not an IT project, it’s an organisation-wide initiative, which depends on support from every level of the business. Appoint VSM champions among the leadership to advocate for the shift and appoint the necessary resources. Persevere, and soon everyone will start to see that eliminating waste and generating customer value has real benefits.