 Value Streams. I've got a quick question for you. Do you know what your organization's value streams are? Do you know how your organization creates value for your customers and your users? Do you know how important those value streams are compared to each other? And do you know how much or how little everything your people are doing right now ties into those value streams? Do you know how much of what you're currently doing is not directly relevant to creating value for your customers or your users? You would be surprised, maybe, maybe you wouldn't, I don't know. You'd be surprised how many leaders of organizations that I work with that would answer no to some or all of those questions. That's quite worrying, not just worrying for me, but more worrying for them, right? So I'm interested. Do you know? Just take a minute and think. Do you know? I remember back many years ago I was working in an organization who were really struggling, well just struggling in general really. They made some effort to try and become a little bit more agile, try and introduce more transparency, self-management, cross-functionality and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, they were still in the early stages and I would say that leadership was starting to lose heart and one of the reasons they were losing heart is because their project management office had a regular dashboard and regular meetings to review progress of all of the projects that were ongoing at that time and over the last few months more and more of the projects that were ongoing in that organization were moving from green where everything was on track and underway to amber where there are a few issues that we might need to work out but things are recoverable to red which is danger. This project is in serious risk of not being delivered and the project management office decided to call all of the project managers together and effectively ask what the heck is going on here and the project manager's response was well we just haven't gone of people. We're really struggling with resources because that's what they call people resources and the PMO said effectively not accepting that as an excuse because you've got more people now than you did have three months ago six months ago and things were on track then so try again. The project managers know seriously we okay we've got more people but we don't have the right people we don't have the people that we need the skills that we need they're all tied up as well we've got all these dependencies across the projects and we just can't get our work done and they didn't know what to do so what did they do they asked the agile coaches who have been trying to make some changes to the way that things were done things were organized things were structured within the organization they've been talking about a lot of agile things for a while but not really getting very far and the PMO said okay agile people you've been saying agile's amazing and agile's the answer to everything agile's the silver bullet for ages they hadn't okay but there were some people in the PMO who let's shall we say we're a little bit skeptical I'm not gonna say they wanted agile to fail but a little bit skeptical I said actually so you guys have been saying agile's great for ages here's your chance how are you gonna solve this problem and I'll be brutally honest as part of that agile coaching team we didn't know we didn't know how to solve that problem but what we did know is that whenever we had a problem our answer always involved a big room lots of people lots of sticky notes lots of sharpies lots of pizza lots of caffeinated drinks so we got the biggest room we could find we got as many people from the project community as we could together and some leadership and we said okay we need to solve this problem first question because what we do in an agile way is we prioritize what is our most important project and there was a lot of argument on a pizza being flown around lots of people shouting and standing out eventually it's one of the members of the leadership team said everybody my project is the most important because if this one doesn't get delivered not only will we get fined but our CEO has a risk of going to jail and I'm not going to be the one that sends our CEO to jail everybody else in the room said fair play okay we have our highest priority project now the next question is who do we need to get that project done and of the people in the room some people put their hands up yeah we need you hand up all right all of you people with your hands up you need to leave right now your work is too important to be coming to meetings like this get back to work so off they went somebody said but but but we need that when you can't have them they're on a really really important project next thing what's our second highest priority project again the argument the pizza flying around the room eventually someone comes up with something okay highest priorities so who do we need to get that second highest priority project done hands up go yeah but we also need you can't have them because they're on a more important project you can have Jeff we don't want Jeff Jeff's not as good as Dave but it's Jeff or nothing okay Jeff welcome to the team good to see you thank you love your work off you go somebody else's yeah but Jeff's on our project not now he's not third priority fourth priority thanks Kiko we couldn't even staff half of our projects okay we knew that we didn't have a clarity around not only our value streams but we didn't have a clarity around our importance of our value streams so we were just trying to keep people busy as much as possible please as many customers as possible and that was getting us into all sorts of problems so I'm sure that won't apply to you and your organization which is great news but let's just say maybe maybe you could benefit from having some greater clarity greater focus on your value streams what can you do okay three things firstly think of who your customers and your users actually are now then first of all customers and users and I certainly the same thing so just work that out you might also need to think about who your customers customers are as that quote from all the president's men goes follow the money all right keep going until you find your actual customers and users then once you know who they are think of what they actually want now that might sound like a strange thing for me to say what I'm saying there is don't think about what you currently offer them or sell them but what their actual real problems are that they want solving now hopefully your solutions will match up with those problems brilliant great market fit but look at what that real problems are a lot of organizations don't actually do that what are they willing to pay for to get resolved and then if you really want to take this further you can start reorganizing and optimizing around these value streams and just as importantly stopping some things that are not directly contributing to value creation now if you struggle with the whole stopping some things maybe have a look at my little article on saying no politely or being much more ruthless in my product mastery course so I hope that helps you understand what value streams are a little bit and gives you something to start identifying and then focusing on your value streams let me know how you get on