New Article: What is in the Blue Boxes of the Assembly Line?

The Assembly Line Identification article introduces the blue boxes as stages in the value stream, but it deliberately keeps the focus on the big picture – the structure and flow between stages rather than what lives inside them. In practice, I have found that this is exactly where many teams get stuck: they understand the overall model but are unsure how to model the internal activities, how strict to set the acceptance criteria, or how to handle parallel tracks, formal approvals, and external dependencies. This new article is a direct response to that gap – a detailed guide to everything that can live inside a stage, illustrated with real examples from software development and automotive contexts, and connected to the Feedback Cycle Times and Designing Organizations Around Value articles for readers who want to go deeper. A central theme is the difference between current state and future state modeling: drawing a stage as it actually works today – with all its dependencies, workarounds, and implicit assumptions made explicit – almost always reveals what needs to change. I hope it gives you both the vocabulary and the confidence to model your own stages with the level of detail that is actually useful.

Read the full article here: What is in the Blue Boxes of the Assembly Line?