In many ways, it is still uncharted territory. IT Revolution, p. This includes where there are delays, where there are more defects and rework being created, and insights into how to remove that waste. Evaluate the people, processes and tools that are involved and what their dependencies are so that the IT leadership has visibility into how things are working. Data Lake vs. Data Warehouse: Know the Difference, Continuous Security Defined and Explained: A Leaders Guide, Break down operational silos by connecting multiple processes, teams, and tools, Ensure governance is embedded into SDLC processes. But theyve only partially delivered; at the current rate of disruption, half of S&P 500 companies will be replaced in the next ten years. You may opt-out by. Visualization is the most powerful way to make those conversations and needs concrete. Then, you move on to the next bottleneck, and so on and so forth. Product marketing is not just learning about a product; its about knowing your audience well enough to connect the two with compelling messaging. This means no one is stepping back to make sure theres alignment. If organizations applied lean manufacturing principles in product development, it would stymy innovation and prevent them from creating the delightful and compelling experiences customers demand. The ability to capture data from any tool without interruptionisolated from third party changes and tool upgradesand without destabilizing the tools daily operation. Work moves back and forth between contributors as it progresses through each phase, morphing, changing, and converging in a highly creative process. The practice of value stream management is meant to answer these questions and help to overcome these common pitfalls. For example, Jeff Bezos urged his shareholders to resist proxies for decision making. The goal of practicing value stream management in software delivery is to increase the rate the flow items make it through the value stream. Often these are kept very distant from one another in an organization and software teams may be caught up in a completely different set of priorities. Again, a healthy value stream is a sustainable one, and you want to find a balance of the four types of work items (features, defects, risk, and technical debt) so you can be consistent every release. Value stream management tools are the technology underpinnings of the VSM practice. Elevate Agile-Plus-DevOps with Value Stream Management, Forrester Research. Case in point recently, I sat in on a meeting at one of the top 10 largest organizations in the world. Thats where value stream management comes in. (Kim, G., Humble, J., Debois, P., & Willis, J. This allows test environment managers to focus on generating value in the SDLC by creating and configuring test environments instead of sorting through hundreds or thousands of requests. agile, DevOps and value stream management are complementary forces, and together can help drive the most possible value by creating visibility and metrics for success. 76.). (2016). It all comes down to the people. This backbone, referred to as the Integration Model, defines the routes that business value can flow through the value stream network. Thinking in value streams helps zoom out of the details and take a macro look at business processes in order to identify strategic ways to improve them. For example, value stream management will ensure that testing and stakeholder reviews are completed and passed before continuing through the SDLC. But in fact, one level deeper, the iterative creative process of software design reveals itself to be a complex flow network of planning, design and engineering communication. Instead, with value stream management platforms, release managers are able to access the state of work within and across value streams in real-time. Enterprises no longer need to translate data from one tool to another in a spreadsheet to understand what is going on in the system as a whole. If the work doesnt add value and is also unnecessary, it clearly should be cut. Turnkey, purpose-built value stream management tools can provide Flow Metrics within days. The ability to join and abstract the data from the individual tools into one integrated set of Flow Metrics. This means that as an idea moves into development, through the build process and into testing, it must be increasing value to the customer until its finally delivered. Flow Metrics hone in on business value, namely how much business value you are delivering today and where you can invest your dollars and talent to deliver more value faster tomorrow. Its easy for organizations to get started with value stream management. In this page well focus on how IT organizations can actually do value stream management for software portfolios. Value stream management achieves this through a systemic approach to software product development that makes becoming a software juggernaut accessible to any organization. With VSMPs, the teams are able to measure both their cost of operating and the value that they are creating. Flow Metrics create a clear set of end-to-end value stream metrics that can be shared by both IT and business leaders. The application of Lean in product development and manufacturing are different.". With converged toolchains, value stream management platforms can provide managers the ability to embed governance into the existing SDLC. According to the Flow Framework, value stream networks require an information backbone that connects the tools and orchestrates near real-time data synchronization between them. But how do you know if your software delivery factory is efficiently delivering value to your customer? Improving your flow efficiency allows you to increase your throughput by eliminating the times that work items wait for the next team member to work on them.But even if youre not forcing through too many work items in a release, you may be trying to deliver more features in a release than is sustainable. Macro business process of software delivery illustrated in a value stream map, Lean thinking starts not with the product, but with the value the customer pulls. Mik Kersten, Project to Product(Kersten (2018). Discipline-specific metrics can often be provided by the tool used to perform that function. Each output is unique,requiring the collaboration of a different set of practitioners to design, build and test it. Project to Product. This eliminates waste and allows you to prioritize based on your customers. Furthermore, the Integration Model also provides the tool network with the elasticity to expand and contract, to evolve and change, to absorb newly acquired networks, experiment with the latest tools, and gradually wean off old ones. As recently as a few years ago, CEOs had no reason to delve into the world of software development, but times have changed. It is nearly impossible to optimize a process when there is a big misunderstanding of its mechanics. Value stream management involves taking a look at all the steps in the software delivery process from idea to production the value stream and then identifying silos, bottlenecks, and other inefficiencies in the flow of work to the customer receiving the product. While standing up a CICD (continuous integration / continuous delivery) pipeline is essential, this infrastructure only creates the potential for a strong software delivery process and superior DevOps performance. What delivers on that potential is having a strong, customer-centric product development cycle that seamlessly brings together the efforts of product owners, release or development managers, risk and compliance teams, as well as engineering teams. IT Revolution, p. 9). A value stream is the sequence of activities an organization undertakes to deliver on a customer need. Value Stream Management: Is the process and automation that enables people to manage dependencies across a complex organization Provides insights into how to break those dependencies to optimize flow Supports the transition to agile ways of working Enables automated, continuous compliance and auditability. Optimizing the value streams (including their associated products or services) that teams are working with also means an organization can realize value outcomes as early as possible. This creates dependencies on things like shared services and resources. Naturally, with the stakes so high, there is zero tolerance for another failed transformation. Value stream management platforms take advantage of the converged toolchain and unified value stream to empower development teams to do just that. Research shows that multitaskers can experience a 40% drop in productivity. Instead, you must find the metrics that directly correspond to business outcomes. The ability to view the data sliced-and-diced through the business lens, so that software delivery performance can be correlated to business results. And at the same time, the pressure from the business to deliver faster is relentless. How Can Your Company Benefit from Consent Management Software? Flow Metrics abstract away details like team structure, technical architecture, and tool implementations. Thats why organizations have worked to optimize software development and IT transformations with practices like agile and DevOps. The units of valuethat flow through through the software value stream are called "flow items". But is that all that flows through a product value stream? These metrics are used as indicators of the health of your value stream and how it is changing over time. Implementing a VSMP will provide organizations with real-time visibility into their value stream that they can leverage for continuous inspection. The Product Model is crucial here. Add to that the cost of data replication and storage, the expertise one must develop on each tools APIs and data schemas, the care you must take to prevent bad queries from impacting tool performance, and the break/fix work following every tool upgrade. Here are the four key DevOps metrics as defined by the Accelerate State of DevOps Report. Scott explores the intersections of technology and teaching. They provide a clear indication of whether your flow is healthy, trending positively, and can support the business results youve targeted. IT Revolution, p. Test environment managers constantly receive booking requests for specifically configured environments. Most organizations are complex and made up of many value streams that often interact with each other. This allows release managers to put their effort towards improving the value stream through release planning and scoping, assessing release risk, and improving the efficiency of the SDLC through automation and efficient orchestration. If teams are open, collaborative and willing to learn and try new things, youre all set, but most enterprises have some legacy thinking, along with legacy technology, that can prove to be an obstacle. Thats why the Value Stream Flow Metrics break work down into two functional and two nonfunctional categories. Then, if youve done it right, the full value of the effort is realized. The software industry has seen amazing organizational transformations with DevOps, which has evolved from its early focus on teamwork and empathy to driving actual value to the organization. Whatever your organizations goals are, achieving them requires the optimization of the value stream. What is a value stream in software delivery? It enables organizations to do value stream management given the complex nature of software delivery knowledge work. Value stream management platforms operate with an integration model that converges toolchains into a common data model that delivers end-to-end visibility and traceability across the value stream. So an increase in WIP is a sign that you may be pushing more work items through your value stream than it can effectively support. Planview completes acquisition of Tasktop. Value stream management is much more than metrics. Well explain how to do that later on in this article. In theory, and when effectively applied, these core elements drive efficiency, high-quality software and faster release cycles. There are actually four flow items in software delivery value streams: Features, defects, risks and debt. Measuring flow is the way to go. As a founding member of the Value Stream Management Consortium, Plutora is committed to helping businesses to deliver more value to their customers. And beyond that threshold, queues will start to form.When theres too much WIP, your teams will lose efficiency by constantly having to switch context between work items. To keep up with software-driven innovation you need fresh approaches to keep teams focused on what delivers or creates the most value. Flow efficiency gives you the percentage of time that a work item is actively being worked on during development. An IT team can be deploying a hundred times per day, but if their work is not connected to the needs of the business, the results will not materialize for the business either. With innovation rapidly changing, the software development and delivery landscape, organizations must remember what is most important. Through executive level insights and actionable real-time visibility, value stream management platforms, like Plutora, deliver the detailed knowledge needed to fuel data-driven decision making that will improve business outcomes. If you can improve your flow, you are on the right track to meeting desired objectives. Itssystematic approach to measuring and improving flow helps organizations shorten time-to-market, increase throughput, improve product quality and optimize for business outcomes. This requires more than a change in technology because technology teams have traditionally been order takers, and the purse strings held by the business. This issue is no longer in the realm of just the CIO, IT professionals or developers. The DevOps Handbook. Thats why you begin with a current state value stream map. Value stream thinking puts the customer at the center, which helps transition IT organizations from an internal, project- and cost-centric focus to a product operating model. To manage value streams from end-to-end, operational silos between tools and teams must first be broken down. Together they evaluate how work flows through your value stream so you can understand how your planning, release and investment decisions are improving and protecting your value delivery and how you are progressing on your DevOps journey. By identifying and examining value streams, instead of features and functions, and measuring software delivery success, teams can focus more energy and time on what works and shift away from what doesnt work. Even after Agile and DevOps, organizations find themselves unable to accelerate delivery fast enough to preempt or react rapidly to disruptions from startups, competition and market changes. measuring process, activity, and operational efficiencies that are indicative of siloed, local optimizations. From each relevant tool, the Product Model carves out the subset of data pertaining to a specific product value stream and includes only that data in the value streams Flow Metrics. The Integration Model connects the tools and routes the work as it progresses from team to team, discipline to discipline, specialized tool to specialized tool. Opinions expressed are those of the author. You can identify where flow slows downwhere a constraint is impeding business value deliveryand start doing whats needed to relieve the bottleneck. This includes being able to incrementally increase product quality and process improvement with every sprint. A key first step here is collecting important measurements and metrics. With the 2018 publication of his Amazon best-selling book Project to Product, Tasktop CEO and Founder Dr. Mik Kersten introduced the Flow Framework for IT leaders to guide and measure the journey to product and their organizations ability to achieve innovation velocity. Ultimately the value of software products is determined by the customer. To be able to continually deliver software products and services that delight your customers, you need to act on business intelligence insights and implement improvements while managing risk. To achieve this, they integrate with DevOps toolchains to provide traceability of Product Backlog Items from idea to value realization, allowing for the calculation of cycle time or value flow. Is it moving in the right direction? Spending all day tracking down data points does not help create value for customers. They can identify where work is slowing down and piling up, so you can find the fastest routes to production. DevOps practices teach organizations to automate the repeatable and mostly linear tasks from code commit to production, similar to a car assembly line. The implementation process is straightforward as value stream management platforms like Plutora integrate directly with your existing tools. With this information and perspective, enterprises can start to systematically optimize their software delivery processes and realize their digital transformation goals.