From Value Stream Maps to Digital Twins

Hey everyone. Welcome back to Techstrong TV. The last time my next guest was on here, his beard wasn't quite as white, it wasn't quite as long.

True. But nevertheless, maybe that means he's wiser and better now. com.

Hey, Jack. It's good to see you, man. How's everything?

It's great. Thanks, Alan. It's great to see you as well.

So we were talking off camera. It's been a minute, Jack, and it's great to see you back out here and happy to have you back on Techstrong TV. Thanks.

Jack, before we jump into Value Stream Pro and recent book you've got out, I wanted to give people a sense, you and I originally crossed paths more around when I was still the DevOps Institute. Absolutely. One of the companies I co-founded, and you were, I think, an ambassador there and doing a lot of work around DevOps.

But give people a sense of your journey, Jack. Thanks. Yeah, I started off actually, oddly, in sales and marketing.

Spent the first half of my career peddling thermoplastic polymer composites for GE and companies about to become GE. And in that process, I made it to the level of being a product manager, which unlocked a whole lot of things for me. I later then moved out of sales and marketing into the IT world, and I brought those lessons with me, and one of the big challenges that we had at the time was helping mechanical and design engineers develop composites that would work for their applications.

And I spent a lot of time developing that process, and then I began to realize that it worked just as well on material and information flows in the organization as well as polycarbonate nylon, carbon fibers, and those kinds of things. And that's where things really took a big shift for me. I moved out of sales and marketing.

I've been in IT ever since, started off as a developer. And I realized that the value stream approach that we were using, at the time, we were a part of Kawasaki. We didn't talk about the Toyota production system, but we used every bit of Lean, and that's where this all gelled for me.

I came out of that experience not knowing that there was even a name for Lean. It's just the way we did things. We operated with kanbans.

We had a continuous improvement. So it really led me then, as I made my career transition, into using those tools to design and develop the systems that I was developing as a coder. And then as I transitioned into management, and leadership roles, I realized that those same exact principles would apply to the interactions that I had with people.

And probably the most interesting part of all was I realized as a former salesman that in every case, a value stream map is what's in it for me. Every person that looks at a value stream map is going to look at it in that lens. What's in this for me?

How do I factor in? Where's my part? And that was a completely unlocking moment for me.

So when we ended up at Nationwide and we were doing that big DevOps thing, they got a big award. Carmen and I wrote a book, got some recognition for that. It was all about applying those concepts.

In fact, in that book, we referenced deterministic process design nine different times as a kind of a shortcut because we didn't have the time and space to really go into the explanation, and leaders didn't need that level of detail. So that's kind of brought me full circle. I came into the DevOps world through that, met Jane and you and other folks, and have spent the last five, seven years really digging in deep, trying to learn everything I can about it so that I didn't speak from the position of I think or I once saw, but having a real deep knowledge, whether it's DevSecOps or whatever, and that's just led me one step to the other.

And then about a year ago, there was this realization that AI was taking over, and I was struggling with things like hallucinations and those kinds of things, and this brought me back one more time to being grounded on facts rather than opinions and so forth. So that's brought me to where I am today. Love it.

I haven't thought about Carmen in a little while. What a great man he was, too. He was.

Carmen was a friend. com. Absolutely.

Talk to us about what that's about. Well, in my consulting practice, I used this as a way of getting things done and being successful without having really externalized it. It was purely an internal instinct-driven approach.

And when I started writing, I realized that I needed to do more and better than that. Also, in the consulting, there were other problems and challenges that people had around value streams because as we look at value streams from a DevOps perspective, it's fairly focused, thin, and narrow, right? We focus on it very closely.

But when we move back into the manufacturing and operations world, it is a much more robust tool. There are a lot different kinds of components that we just haven't incorporated into the DevOps space yet. So that became kind of the driving factor for me for Value Stream Pro was, guys, we've got a lot of good stuff here and we're leaving most of it on the table.

Let's refocus on these tools that have proven themselves since the 1950s. Update them, right? It's no longer this linear pencil-driven model.

Now it's really on the level of digital twins, and we need to get from this very simplistic view of a value stream map into something that really will enable us to build Digital twins because we've looked at the detail level, and we can use those as a way of building and maintaining those digital twins. In fact, we have a beta test going on right now with the folks at DS Optima to be able to use value stream maps through an API into their digital twin tool, which really then unlocks the ability to use simulations and projections, which give you that forward-looking view before we do these things in a realistic way. So Value Stream Pro came out of this need to help people realize you've latched onto a good tool, but there's more there, and we can unsurface that.

I love it. Desurface. That's a weird word.

And then, just speaking about this whole value stream movement, and a lot of people call it flow now, right? Sure. Yeah.

I think it was last week, maybe it was the week before already. They're all starting to run into each other. But Helen Beale and her Flowtopia community had their annual virtual event.

I believe you spoke there. Last week, yes. And well-received.

I heard the event went very well. Great. An amazing lineup of speakers.

Helen always does a- Yes ... good job there as the- Great person ... as the chief flower.

Yep. So I just wanted to give that a shout-out. io, isn't it?

It is. Mm-hmm. If you go there, you might already be able to get a lot of the sessions on demand still, including your own.

Yes. Jack, I wanted to pivot, though, and talk about your most recent book. Thank you.

Yeah. Share with our audience, if you don't mind. Sure.

So "Deterministic Process Design: The Secret Sauce" literally started in 1999 when I was doing my master's program at Penn State. That was the mechanism that I used in my research there for the thermoplastic composite calculator. It then evolved over time, and it sat for a very long time because I didn't really know what to do with it.

And it has only been in the past couple of years that I finally was able to look deeply enough within myself and to make it simple enough. There's, I think, an old saying about Pascal had written a letter, and he said, "I'm sorry it's so long. " Mm.

And that's kind of where I was with the deterministic process design. " And one of the ways I broke that was, beginning in 2016, I think it was, I started giving it away. com today, in there there's a download section.

And there's templates, there's a complete PowerPoint presentation about how this works and what it is so that you can do this all DIY on your own. But what I found was that for a lot of folks, the jump was just a little bit too far. And so, I wrote the "Deterministik Process Design" book to bridge that gap.

Once you go through that book, it's almost a paint by numbers. And there was one more piece that was missing, and that's the Liviti OS. And that was just in the past couple of years.

I realized that the missing link here was that we had the right ideas, but it wasn't explicitly human-centric, and it wasn't explicitly dollar denominated. And so that's what Liviti OS brings, is it brings that clarity. Because most of our CIOs still report through CFOs, and if you want to talk to them in their language, there's nothing better than P&L sheet speak.

So being able to tie a delay to an impact to P&L, to be able to tie a deferred decision to an actual cost, then that brings it into focus. The other piece was once we started identifying those things with numbers, we could then begin to rationalize them. Your value is more important than mine.

Nobody ever says that. But this is a way that we can look at strategic value versus tactical value versus operational need and be able to draw a line on what's this going to cost us, what's it worth, and how can we make sure that we're building in the guardrails, the guidelines, the thresholds, and the triggers so that people can do this stuff without being afraid of breaking the system or getting themselves into trouble. When I had a hot rod shop, we always fixed the brakes before we touched the engine, and that's kind of what Liviti OS is all about, making sure that we've got those controls in place so that when we do unleash AI, for example, or just plain old creative people, we give them all kinds of room to play.

We give them all kinds of support, and we make sure that we build it in an environment that has psychological and systemic safety as the core. I love it. io.

Really? Oh, very cool. And it's available for free there.

It's the only place it will be available for free. The main book is right now going from developmental editing into house editing, so there's still a little bit of delay on the main book. But the websites are available and open for downloads.

If anyone is interested in getting a copy of Liviti OS as being one of your followers, all they have to do is reach out to either me or you, and I'll provide it to you if you like, and they can get a free copy of the Liviti OS. That's the companion guide, and it includes a lot of information. Most importantly, it's a series of workbooks and worksheets.

That's why my publisher doesn't mind me giving it away because they don't want to fool with those. But it- Right. Yeah.

That's poisonous. Hate that stuff, right? Yep.

Yeah. But just kind of takes you to, if you use the website, and you use the Liviti OS guide, it's going to get you 80, 90% there. And for most people, that'll be enough.

So this can be a completely DIY, doesn't have to cost you a dime kind of a thing. Or we can dive in as deep as you like. Jack, I love it, man.

I love it. I love to see how productive you are. I love to see you still really thought leadership personified, man.

I appreciate you. Thanks. We've still got one more book in the queue right now.

We're doing a rewrite, actually, on "Focused Improvement: Innovation on Design," because it was not written with AI in mind, so that's next in the hopper. com. All right.

It'll keep you busy. I'm sure there'll be one after that, too, Jack. It'll keep me off the streets.

Yeah. That's good, man. Hey, it's fantastic seeing you.

Thank you so much. Likewise. Thank you for all you do.

com. Jack does a lot of things. All righty.

Thank you. We're going to take a break here on Techstrong TV. We'll be right back.