What steps can you take today to start visualizing and optimizing your organization’s value streams before making further changes?

Agile Ethics Leadership

Stelian ROMAN Project Manager| MicroSafety Carlingford, New South Wales, Australia

Agile transformation is a journey that many organizations undertake to become more adaptive, responsive, and efficient in delivering value to their customers. However, a common pitfall is to rush into changing the team’s way of working by imposing Agile frameworks, such as adopting Scrum, without first understanding the current flow of work and information. Value Stream Mapping is a powerful tool that enables organizations to trace the end-to-end flow of information and materials, surfacing bottlenecks, delays, and inefficiencies. By leveraging Value Stream Mapping before altering team structures, organizations can ensure that their Agile transformation leads to meaningful, sustainable improvements.

Agile transformation often promises faster delivery, higher quality, and happier teams. Yet, many organizations encounter significant roadblocks when shifting to Agile frameworks.

This blog post explores the critical role of Value Stream Mapping in Agile transformation, common challenges organizations face, key recommendations for implementing Value Stream Mapping effectively, and actionable insights to drive organizational efficiency.

Blog post: Value Stream Mapping (VSM) for Agile Transformation

ProjectManagement.com - The Agile Enterprise

Posted: Jul 21, 2026 10:21 PM

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Robert Snyder Founder & President| Innovation Elegance, LLC Chicago, Il, United States

Visualization ... or aligning on visualization ... inevitably justifies documentation.

Your reference to "before making further changes" steers me toward Current State documentation and certain cross-project documentation.

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is today.

The best time to document Current State was back when it qualified as Future State. The second best time is today.

Posted: Jul 21, 2026 10:25 PM (Updated by author: Jul 21, 2026 10:26 PM)

Robert Snyder Founder & President| Innovation Elegance, LLC Chicago, Il, United States

An extensive-but-not-exhaustive list.
An Asset Portfolio I can defend.

Lens of the Market (6)

Market Forces Matrix
Voice of the Customer & Seller
Crystal Ball / Decisions Unknowns Outcomes (DUO) (decision trees / corporate bets)
Roadmap
Crisis Communication Checklist
Crisis Communication Script

Lens of the Team (4)

Change Log
Parking Lot (Barriers, Risks, Issue, Questions)
Lessons Learned
Approachability Menu

Lens of the Individual (6)

…

Current State (10)

Operational Scorecard (3)
Culture Scorecard
Current State Inventory
System Actor Inventory
Current State Scripts
Current State Process Flows
Customer Experience Hierarchy
Use Case Assessment

Tech Assets (relevant to Current State & Future State)

Design Specs (valuable for each subsequent project): 10
Build Specs: 4 (where Tech Debt resides)
Test Specs: 7

All of these are worth governing not with Four Adjectives (RACI), but with Five Verbs.
Draft, Review, Revise, Approve, Distribute.
Placing Review & Revise on the same row in the project plan, so four rows.

RACI omits interdependencies, duration estimates, and a sense of closure.
Five Verbs is crystal clear about interdependencies, duration estimates, and a sense of closure.

John Doerr has a relevant quote …

“Unacknowledged interdependencies are the number one root cause of project slippages.”

So, simple interdependencies are very valuable to minimize project slippages.

Many of these comprise what I described in a separate post as Finite Productivity.
The math here is 41 x 4 (rows for each) = 164. Explicit, not rigid.

Doing this work drops your Documentation Debt to zero.
Stelian, these are precise (not rigid) “steps we can take today to visualize value streams before making further changes.”
These are instrumental to reduce VUCA (acknowledging that many workplace cultures are pro-VUCA).
The concept of Finite Productivity helps you be completely at peace if executives reject this Asset Portfolio, reject Five Verbs, and reject the concept and culture of Finite Productivity.
Because the alternative is clear and explicitly sponsored, i.e., Infinite Activity.

Items under the umbrella of Infinite Activity include …

Meetings
Meeting minutes
Emails
Jira tickets
User Stories
RACI
Slack or Teams channels
“Verb Sprawl” (dozens of distinct verbs in public dumping ground task lists, action items)

This list is also valuable because if you have executives who are averse to documentation (Stelian, you mentioned roadblocks), get their signoff that the team will thoughtfully avoid all of these, and any such related information will be “visualized” strictly in other places. 😊

I don’t know many others who think in terms of a full Asset Portfolio, Five Verbs, or Finite Productivity, so I’m eager to see alternate perspectives to this question.
I do know several common documents that Five Verbs might feel overkill.

These assets (and this culture of a Decision Symphony) aim for certain culture traits like low latency and low marginal cost for collaboration, communication, decisions, and expectation setting. Agile claims many things. Does anyone know if Agile also claims low latency or low marginal cost?

Posted: Jul 21, 2026 11:14 PM

Robert Snyder Founder & President| Innovation Elegance, LLC Chicago, Il, United States

The Asset Portfolio above mentioned a Culture Scorecard, and it feels like a good time to elaborate on four of those metrics.

Complexity
Target value = 5
(number of distinct verbs in your project plan)
If your executives shrug at this metric, your new target value is 100

Finite Productivity
Target value = 164
(in this example)
If your executives shrug at this metric, your new target value is 0

Documentation Debt
Target Value = 0
(because your team is perpetually executing the muscle memory of Five Verbs)
If your executives shrug at this metric, your new target value is 41 (using same example)

Interchangeability
Target value = half of 41 (subjective)
(the average team member could contribute at any time to half of the assets in the portfolio)
If your executives shrug at this metric, your new target value is 0 (everyone is a single point of failure, all work has a single point of failure)

Reactions, pushback, questions welcome.

Posted: Jul 21, 2026 11:26 PM

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What steps can you take today to start visualizing and optimizing your organization’s value streams before making further changes?

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