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Maria Muir
Nov 124 min read

Biggest enabler to flow of value – Value Streams

One of the biggest blockers to flow of value in large organisations is from teams delivering and operating in functional silos. I have worked across sectors, including banks, telcos, energy and insurance, and have seen the impact of this time and time again.


Operating in silos results in:

  • Disconnected priorities as there is no E2E view with each team working on their piece

  • Unclear alignment to strategy / outcomes with local optimisation of customer experience and products/services.

  • Slow decision making as multiple senior leaders are accountable e.g. 8-12

  • Tension between teams as their intent is to collaborate, but their incentives/KPIs are not aligned as they report to different leaders

  • Wait time and delays as work is handed off

  • Focus on managing dependencies increasing delivery complexity


In large organisations where there has not been a focus on improving ways of working, it is typical for work to be blocked over 90% of the time.


The bottom-line impact of this is:

  • Delayed realisation of value and loss of competitive advantage with your customers

  • Increase in your cost to serve with wasted hours spent by your team members

  • Decrease in employee engagement from their frustration and context switching


We know that in order to deliver an integrated, E2E customer outcome, it requires cross-functional skills and capabilities. It requires us to answer: how might we organise to deliver on outcomes.


When you want to break down operating silos (....and I mean really break down silos...), you need to think about: how you bring people together to work together day-to-day, from across those silos so that you have the required skills/capabilities, aligned to a common vision with a set of shared outcomes, and with the ownership to deliver on those outcomes.


This is what I call a Value Stream. It is a way to bring together the required people, value being created, the process and tech to deliver, all with high cohesion and low coupling. This is how we need to organise to deliver in the Age of Digital, and now, in today’s context of the Age of AI.


Before I go any further, I’d like to mention that Value Streams is a term that means different things to different people. I would like to acknowledge the origins of the term from the manufacturing context as referenced by "Information and Material Flow" at Toyota.


Based on my experience, shifting to Value Streams is the #1 ways of working improvement unlock.


What does a Value Stream look like?


A Value Stream is not something to be thought of in isolation. A Value Stream is a nested concept and is a network - starting at the Enterprise. The diagram below from the SSH Value Stream Primer shows how this might look in an organisation.


Based on my experience, there are 2 types of Value Streams:


  1. One that has an external customer as the value consumer. I often refer to these in practice as a Customer Value Stream.

  2. One that has an internal customer as the value consumer. In the SSH definitions included, this is called a Shared Service Value Stream. Oftentimes, these are shared technology capabilities, and I refer to these as Platforms. These platforms have 3 key things: thing of value, value producers, and value consumers. Based on experience, not treating Platforms like Value Streams leads to challenges, as we focus more on producing the cool widget, we aren't clear on who is going to use it, and there isn't a strategy/roadmap.


Value Stream Organisational Pattern

What does a Value Stream have?


It has:

🔷 Customer (external or internal)

🔷 Vision, Strategy and a clear definition of what Value it will create

🔷 Outcomes it will deliver and how (OKRs, Outcome Roadmap)

🔷 Accountability to deliver with clear alignment in incentives/KPIs

🔷 E2E Ownership of Customer Experience, Process, and Technology required to deliver Value

 🔷 Dedicated and stable cross-functional teams with individuals from across product, design/CX, delivery, technology, marketing, data, etc.

🔷 Investment and allocated funding for fixed capacity (capex/opex)

🔷 Leadership with a Trio - Value, Team/Delivery and Technology/Architecture



It supports:

🔶 Leaner ways of working to enhance productivity and efficiency

🔶 Customer focus to improve customer experience

🔶 Time to value to unlock competitive advantage

🔶 Shift from project to product to optimise delivery


How do you get started with Value Streams?


Getting started means getting some data first! A shift towards how you organise to deliver on value needs to be considered!


Step 1: Understand the flow of value in your organisation.


SSH has a handy Flow Mapping tool that you can leverage to help get you started. Visualising the flow of work from Idea to Value is helpful to identify the hand-offs, bottlenecks, and dependencies.

💎 Consider this as your Value Journey Map - what are the steps, who is involved, what are the pain points, and what are the enablers.

📣 Use this to have discussions with your leader to illustrate the flow efficiency and to guide next steps.


Step 2: Define your design principles.


Agreeing on a set of guardrails is helpful to inform what needs to be true whilst you look at designing a value stream. There are 6 design principles that I have used as a starting point with a number of different organisations that you may leverage to tailor to suit your context.


The difference between organising and delivering

For more information


For further learning, there are a number of great case studies to learn from on Value Streams. Check out:






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