Value-stream mapping for marketing teams

Value-Stream Mapping for Marketing Teams

Value-Stream Mapping is a vital means of aligning team members, and stakeholders, with where in our marketing processes we deliver value to customers – ‘customers’ here could refer to the end client, a consumer, or internal stakeholders.

The basic purpose of Value-Stream Mapping is to ensure that every team member, irrespective of individual responsibilities, is able to explain each and every step we take to deliver value to customers in a timely manner.

What is a Value-Stream Map

Once built, a Value-Stream Map is a visual representation of the flow of “goods” from “supplier”, to “customer”. I have put these terms in quotation marks, as we should adjust them slightly to better reflect marketing process – i.e. a visual representation of the flow of creative from the team to stakeholders/clients.

While similar to a workflow in the sense of a Value-Stream Map being a flowchart visualising process, it has the key difference of signifying steps based on the distinction of:

• Steps that add value for stakeholders/clients
• Steps that do not add value for stakeholders/clients

It is not that the value-adding steps are more important than the non-value-adding steps. Rather, this distinction better serves the Value-Stream Map’s purpose of highlighting inefficiencies, and understand where ‘customer’ value actually sits in a given process.

How to build an accurate Value-Stream Map

The easiest and most effective way to go about building an accurate Value-Stream Map is to simply ask questions regarding the process, while ensuring the team feel comfortable giving honest, relevant answers.

• Where do our tasks originate?
• What types of tasks do we do?
• What needs to happen per-task for it to be considered complete?
• Where does completed work go?
• How long does it take to deliver value?

Once you have detailed, highly granular answers to each of these questions, the Value-Stream Map can be visualised across a Kanban Board, with annotation regarding the passage of tasks through each stage, detailing transfer of information, the nature of particular processes and any dependencies in marketing production. Most importantly, for different task types, demarcate exactly when and where in the process that the task has value to the ‘customer’.

To visualise a working Value-Stream Map, I usually start with the basic post it notes on a whiteboard, and then transfer that onto a neat, digital flowchart (I use draw.io). From here, you can begin improving your processes.

If your Value-Stream Mapping initiative is to be successful, before making any adjustments you must ensure you have stuck to the following rules, else your map will be inaccurate, and rendered useless:

• Be honest with yourself and the team
• Be transparent with stakeholders inside and outside of the team
• Don’t leave anything out – the Value-Stream Map must be exhaustive of any and all tasks/processes to be an effective resource
• Take ownership – practically, the Value-Stream Map should be legible to anyone in the business, irrespective of their stake in the marketing process

Once the current state is exhaustively captured in your Value-Stream Map, it can be used to clearly and accurately identify:

• Silos in the process where little or poor information exchange takes place
• Any bottlenecks
• Instances of process waaste
• Parts of the Value-Stream entirely within your control
• When and where value is provided to the ‘customer’

This information can then be applied in turn to improve processes, remove silos and bottlenecks, and overall streamline your marketing value output, and eventually built into your project management software of choice as a Kanban Board, Clickup, Monday.com, Jira etc.

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