Value Stream Mapping – For your Dynamics 365 or Power Platform project

A few months ago, I started working for a new client on a large Dynamics 365 implementation.

As with every new project, the first few days I spent reviewing the existing documentation and talking with various project stakeholders to get familiar with the project context and understand the client needs, challenges, solution landscape and key requirements.

While trying to understand the project requirements, I came across an interesting diagram that referenced all requirements in a schematic representation. The client calls this diagram “Value Stream Mapping”.

“This Value Stream Mapping is the source of all features and holds them together.”

Ivan Yankov, the Lead Business Analyst on the project at that time.

Since I was intrigued, Ivan walked me through his process of creating the “Value Stream Mapping” and explained how every single feature that they identified originated from that diagram.

I found beauty in this approach as the diagram is created through a set of logical steps and simple to understand but is a powerful tool to generate an initial list of requirements.

WHAT IS VALUE STREAM MAPPING? A DEFINITION

Let’s start with the basics, what in fact is value stream mapping?

While there are many definitions of “Value Stream Mapping” available online, I found the one from WIKIPEDIA to be most accurate to how I would use the tool on my Dynamics 365 or Power Platform projects.

“A value stream is the set of actions that take place to add value to a customer from the initial request through realization of value by the customer. A value stream always begins and ends with a customer.

A value stream depicts the stakeholders initiating and involved in the value stream, the stages that create specific value items, and the value proposition derived from the value stream”.

Value Stream on Wikipedia

It is also important to note that:

• Value Stream Maps are different from Process Flow Diagrams as they address how value is achieved rather than how it’s done.
• Value Stream Maps are not Customer Journey Maps. While both take the perspective of the external stakeholder, they seek to describe different sets of information. Customer Journey Maps typically describe the emotions, intent, and individual interactions with a customer.

WHEN TO USE THE VALUE STREAM MAPPING ON YOUR DYNAMICS 365 & POWER PLATFORM PROJECTS:

The Value Stream is the perfect tool to start building your initial list of requirements and create your Product Backlog. When creating the Value Stream, we identify the key actions that take place from the initial client interaction to the realization of value.

The Value Stream is the catalyst for all your product features and acts as the backbone that holds them together.

The “Value Stream Mapping” is mostly used before your project even starts. It’s initially done during the need assessments phase of your project. It contributes to the business case and helps identify WHY the project exists.
To better explain how to create a “Value Stream Mapping” let me walk through this hypothetical example.

How to create a “Value Stream Mapping”.

Let’s consider that we work with a university that wants to implement Dynamics 365 Customer Service to manage student enquiries. Dynamics 365 is already in use in other areas of the university so implementing the Dynamics 365 Customer Services app is the preferred option for them.

The customer service team is hoping that Dynamics 365 will solve the following challenges they currently have:

• The university is using different and disconnected systems to manage applications, student enquiries and enrolment. Missing an opportunity to understand the full experience that students have when interacting with the university.
• When a student contacts the customer service team with an enquiry, the team has no visibility into previous interactions with that student as different tools are used to manage all enquiries.
• The team has no visibility into the workload among staff members which creates bottleneck and delays in providing information and services to students.

So where do we begin with building our Value Stream Map?

1. Initial Workshop

The first thing we need to do is organize and plan a workshop with key stakeholders of the concerned areas. In this case we need to involve the following stakeholders:

• The heads of the concerned departments at the university; ex: Customer Services, Sales (As they already use Dynamics 365) and IT.
• Each head of department can bring one or 2 key SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) along.
• One or 2 client representatives. In this case, we invite a student advocate that will be able to provide the student (our customer) point of view while building the Value Stream Map.

2. Brainstorm the major actions

Together with all the stakeholders, brainstorm the major actions that are taking place to add value to your students from their initial enquiry to the realization of the value.

The end result of the brainstorming session might look like the following:

While discussing the major actions we realize that some supporting actions are also required. Even if they do not provide direct value to the student, they provide value to the user of the system. And, making the user of the system more productive is ultimately adding value to the student.

3. Identify “How Might We” statement for each of the major actions

Once you have established the main actions, work with the team to identify the “How Might We” statement for each of the actions. This will help you find the solutions that you need to implement for each of those actions.

“We use the How Might We format because it suggests that a solution is possible and because it offers you the chance to answer in a variety of ways. A properly framed How Might We doesn’t suggest a particular solution but gives you the perfect frame for innovative thinking.”

How Might We on Design Kit

4. Understand the “WHY” and the “HOW” for each “How Might We” statement.

Once you have your “How Might We” statement, you can then brainstorm possible solution ideas by using the “Abstraction Laddering” technique.

Abstraction Laddering provides a template for considering a given challenge statement at different levels of focus. Asking “Why” will help you step back and look at the issue more broadly and will make sure that you are solving the right problem.

The Why will help you identify if you are solving the right problem. It can also help you find intangible business value.

From our example above, we can confirm that we are indeed trying to solve the right problem here. We have also captured the following requirements:

• After a student found the information he was looking for, measure the client satisfaction using a simple survey.
• At the end of each month, measure the amount of time staff spent on responding to student enquiries so that we can determine if the information provided on the portal is reducing staff workload.
• At the end of each month, measure the type of questions / information searched for by students to identify what is top of mind for them and add additional services to respond to their needs. Ex: If students are often searching about information on how to access their latest exam score, maybe the faculty should find a better way of providing this information to student.

Once you understand the “Why” going down the ladder and asking “How” helps you find more concrete solution ideas.
Ex: Based on our scenario, see below the possible solutions we have found:

• When a student is lacking information, he can navigate to a student portal and find answers to questions by searching the FAQ database.
• When the student can’t find the information required on the portal, he can communicate using the channel of choice with a human agent to find the information he needs, or he can post a question in the forum where other students can answer his enquiry.

Another approach here is to focus on the WHAT and the WHY instead of the WHY and the HOW. Ex: A student wants access to knowledge (WHAT) or want their questions answered quickly (WHAT) to save time (WHY).

This approach only focusses on defining the problem and is useful when you are not sure about the technology you will be using. Ex: Maybe the portal with knowledge articles or an FAQ (the HOW from the example above) are not the best ways to solve the problem at this stage.

The technology that solves the problem for me is outside of the scope of value stream mapping and is the next step, where experts equipped with the proper WHAT and WHY from the value streams come with the proposal of the technology solution. The HOW.”

Ivan Yankov – the Lead Business Analyst on the project at that time.

5. Final Diagram

When you are done with all your “How Might We” statements, your diagram should look similar to the one below.

You now have a simple, well-founded graphical representation that you can use to start building out your backlog and that you can refer back to throughout the project to ensure you stay on track and your focus remains on the value add.