By now, you're well on your way to producing your Current State map.  The team is probably already coming up with ideas as to how to improve the process.  But you have one last step to carry out.  This step is, as far as I know, unique to my own approach.  There is probably someone somewhere doing something similar but I haven't seen anything like it in particular in the literature on value stream mapping.

It's a technique I learned in grad school and have applied to value stream mapping.  The official term for the technique is "variance analysis".  I usually just call it "brainstorming for the stuff that goes wrong at each step".  Because that's what it is.

Here's the idea:  the team goes back to the first step and brainstorms a list of everything that can go wrong at that step. 

First, a few words about brainstorming (and you can skip this paragraph if you think you're well versed in the brainstorming method).  Brainstorming isn't discussion...it's brainstorming.  Get ideas, write them on a flip chart and keep going.  Get as many ideas as you can.  Don't let anybody get into talking about how bad the problem is or whether it's really that important or not.  The team will sort the good ideas from the less good ones later.  Get all the ideas written down.

So, again, go back to the first step and ask the team, "What is anything that can go wrong at this step?"  You want to make certain that the team focuses only on problems that might occur at the focus step.  Teams will tend to brainstorm problems that show up at a particular step but actually occured earlier in the process.  For example, at the "inspect finished product" step, the team might brainstorm all sorts of quality defects that could be identified at that step.  But the quality defect didn't occur at the inspection step, it occurred at an earlier step.  It's at the earlier step that the quality defect needs to be put.  On the other hand, the team might brainstorm "Quality department doesn't inspect in a timely fashion" would   be a problem at the inspection step. 

In other cases, you might need some clarification to make sure where the defect happens.  For example, at a "receive raw material shipment" step, the team might brainstorm "wrong material delivered".  You would ask, "Is this because of a ordering error on our part?"  If so, then that problem would be listed at an earlier step.    On the other hand if the team says, "We might have ordered correctly and still gotten the wrong material from the vendor."

After brainstorming problems at each step, the team will need to prioritize those problems.  I usually have them do this at each step.  Once they've brainstormed all the possible problems at a particular step, I'll ask, "Which of these problems causes the most harm and/or happens the most?" It's not necessary to get a rock-solid, data-proven set of priorities at this point.  You just want a general sorting of more important and less important problems.

OK, that's it!  You've finished your Current State Value Stream Map! What do you do with it?  Check back here for the answer!