Winner of The Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award!Align your leadership team to deliver the highest possible value to your customersToo many organizations today suffer from silo-centric behavior and intra-organizational conflict. Yet most don't understand what's holding them back from achieving outstanding performance. Value stream mapping--an essential but underusedmethodology--is a proven approach to help you visualize and resolve disconnects, redundancies, and gaps in your value delivery system. More than merely a tool to eliminateoperational waste, value stream mapping is a highly effective means to transform leadership thinking, define strategy and priorities, and create customer-centric work flow. In this detailed guide, business performance improvement experts Karen Martin and Mike Osterling present a practical way to deeply understand how work gets done--in any environment--and how to design improvedwork systems. You'll learn how to: Prepare and engage your leadership team in the transformation processGain a deep understanding about your current work systems and the related barriers to delivering valueDesign a future state that enables outstanding performance on all frontsAdopt the new design and lay the foundation for continued improvement Whether you are a novice, an experienced improvement practitioner, or a leader, Value Stream Mapping will help you design and operate your business more effectively. And if your organization already uses value stream mapping, this book will help you improve yourtransformation efforts. In today's rapid-fire business environment, there are too many problems to be solved and too many opportunities to be leveraged to operate without a highly effective means for accomplishing the important work to be done.Value stream mapping is the missing link in business management and, properly executed, has the power to address many business woes.