Given the maturity of the discipline of information visualization, we should be able to visualize every aspect of each activity that happens within a software value stream. (Kersten (2018). Governance guides us to do the right things and make them auditable, and as regulations continue to increase, so does the cost of compliance. Value stream management platforms make this navigable through business intelligence features that allow teams to focus on the most important metrics and track them in real-time. And at the same time, the pressure from the business to deliver faster is relentless. In addition, they communicate the overall picture of how value flows from inception till its final destination, helping organizations make adjustments to get there fastest by eliminating roadblocks, circumventing bottlenecks and rerouting as necessary. Theyve gone from taking weeks or months to release a new version to deploying changes multiple times per day. Unfortunately, proxy metrics are misleading, as they do not tie directly to business outcomes and cannot be relied upon to present an accurate picture. In another common example, while breaking down the feature in the implementation process, a glaring omission in user experience is found, and work will go back to feature design. 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. According to the Flow Framework, software delivery value streams must be visualized from the businesss perspective. IT Revolution, p. 9). A software value stream includes every activity from idea to production needed to deliver software products or services to customers. Learn more about getting started with value stream management in our ebook: Mastering Software Delivery with Value Stream Management; or read our comprehensive guide to Value Stream Management, featuring key essentials, core challenges, and tips from the experts. One leading U.S. insurance company spent a year and $1million to build their own Flow Time metric, only to find the investment rendered obsolete the moment they even slightly modified their toolchain. If you see one month youve only delivered features, its a safe bet that next month you will have to deliver mostly defects. It enables organizations to do value stream management given the complex nature of software delivery knowledge work. 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. All Rights Reserved . How software delivery value streams are different from manufacturing value streams, What to measure in software delivery value streams, How to measure flow across heterogenous toolchains, How, in practice, to improve flow through software delivery value streams. Visualization is the most powerful way to make those conversations and needs concrete. Forrester defines value stream management as A combination of people, process, and technology that maps, optimizes, visualizes, and governs business value flow (including epics, stories, work items) through heterogeneous enterprise software delivery pipelines. These new, more iterative approaches have paved the way for greater collaboration and visibility among software teams, and have opened the door for automation, efficiency and more responsiveness to customer needs and business objectives. Thats why the Value Stream Flow Metrics break work down into two functional and two nonfunctional categories. 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. This eliminates waste and allows you to prioritize based on your customers. So, why not just extend the lean manufacturing practices upstream? 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. This includes being able to incrementally increase product quality and process improvement with every sprint. To see the best return on software investments, organizations must always focus on business value and customer satisfaction. The ability to join and abstract the data from the individual tools into one integrated set of Flow Metrics. 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). Focusing on value streams makes the value delivered to the customer the cornerstone of software product development. Meaning, it overlays the business lens on top of whatever technical, architectural or tool-related reality exists. Itssystematic approach to measuring and improving flow helps organizations shorten time-to-market, increase throughput, improve product quality and optimize for business outcomes. It also means that leadership has an organization-wide performance heat map to help them direct their efforts to support discovery and improvement in teams.As organizations continue to transition from a waterfall, silo-based working model to one built on autonomous teams delivering value incrementally, a key change is needed to financial models. They need efficient and reliable ways to do this because software is constantly changing and the process to adopt new IT strategies across the enterprise requires more time and focus. To manage value streams from end-to-end, operational silos between tools and teams must first be broken down. Copyright 2012 2022 Plutora. But is that all that flows through a product value stream? For many organizations, DevOps has been transformative, however, plenty of enterprises still struggle to know exactly what value is being derived from massive IT investments. You will have to rely on proxy metrics to understand whats going on, such as story point velocity, and not be able to directly improve on whats holding you back from becoming a high performing software organization. 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. (Kim, G., Humble, J., Debois, P., & Willis, J. How can you improve it? Each output is unique,requiring the collaboration of a different set of practitioners to design, build and test it. As part of this we are continuously searching for improvement opportunities that require us to be able to easily measure and gain insights from what we are doing. Planview completes acquisition of Tasktop. Value stream management solutions are capable of collecting and compiling all those data points and drawing a map of how value flows through your teams. Using the latest tools and practices are only as valuable as the business benefit and customer experience. Opinions expressed are those of the author. Systematically improve your digital transformation journey while scaling Agile and DevOps across the enterprise. The units of valuethat flow through through the software value stream are called "flow items". You may opt-out by. DevOps practices teach organizations to automate the repeatable and mostly linear tasks from code commit to production, similar to a car assembly line. In many ways, it is still uncharted territory. Get the Buyer's Guide for Value Stream Management and Flow Metrics, Ultimate Guide to Value Stream Management and Software Delivery Disciplines. They can identify where work is slowing down and piling up, so you can find the fastest routes to production. Learn how to conduct a value stream mapping session in your organization to identify the software value streams in your portfolio. Connecting your value stream networks and automating the flow of work across the value stream is one of the lowest hanging fruits to removing waste. As a founding member of the Value Stream Management Consortium, Plutora is committed to helping businesses to deliver more value to their customers. 2022 Forbes Media LLC. The DevOps Handbook. It is nearly impossible to optimize a process when there is a big misunderstanding of its mechanics. This unlocks the ability not only to measure what is in the value streams now, but how they got there, and trends over time. Research shows that multitaskers can experience a 40% drop in productivity. Value stream management offers a unique view of the software delivery life cycle through the customer experience lens, to better align with business objectives and scale agile and DevOps transformations. Similar to live traffic apps like Google Maps and Waze, you should be able to visualize and analyze the flow of value as it traverses the value stream network of tools and practitioners. Scott explores the intersections of technology and teaching. For example, Jeff Bezos urged his shareholders to resist proxies for decision making. Because they simply do not apply in the same way to product development. Otherwise, IT and the business will never bridge the crippling divide between them and will remain on opposing sides of a fence. 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. That requires shortening the time it takes to complete flow items, start to finish. Thats where value stream management comes in. 15. 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. Enterprises and agencies that have implemented DevOps have reaped dramatic benefits. Expertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Value stream management tools are the technology underpinnings of the VSM practice. Elevate Agile-Plus-DevOps with Value Stream Management, Forrester Research. 2-3.). Process improvement begins with measuring where you are and identifying opportunities to work toward where you want to go. For example, value stream management will ensure that testing and stakeholder reviews are completed and passed before continuing through the SDLC. 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. However, because software development and delivery is complex in large organizations, it can be difficult to map the value stream from end-to-end. For value stream management to work, an organization has to invest across people, process and tools so its imperative that these investments are justified. Things that may inhibit value stream management thinking from taking root and producing positive change in an organization could be a culture that is resistant to change. Many digital transformations fail or stall because they cant answer these questions. Organizations cant stop at simply becoming a software company, they need to be a high performing one. The ideal value stream visualization tool gathers the individual work item statuses in real-time and reframes them in business terms, so people can see how business value is flowingnot just work. Then, if youve done it right, the full value of the effort is realized. However, too often, the headlong pursuit of higher productivity in software delivery leads to well-intentioned initiatives that ultimately fall short of their goals. In practical terms, getting actionable real-time visibility into end-to-end flow requires three things: Once armed with visibility into the flow of your product value streams, you can get to problem-solving. How Can Your Company Benefit from Consent Management Software? A key first step here is collecting important measurements and metrics. This real-time, decentralized P&L information can drive the conversation around changing funding models to more agile ones, such as capacity-based-funding models. This is because todays CIOs have a mandate to create more business value with fewer resources. 8.). The founder and chairman of the company specified that a top priority for the business was transforming the way the companys software development teams work. Value Stream Mapping. Most organizations are complex and made up of many value streams that often interact with each other. IT Revolution, p. 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. Proxy metrics that measure a specific silo are only meaningful if the silo itself is the bottleneck. But to manage value streams, organizations need to first gain end-to-end visibility and control of the multiple, interconnected value streams throughout their portfolio. As recently as a few years ago, CEOs had no reason to delve into the world of software development, but times have changed. Every company today is a software company, and the role of Chief Information Officer (CIO) has never been more important. Here are the four key DevOps metrics as defined by the Accelerate State of DevOps Report. Measuring flow is the way to go. They visualize current and historical flow for a product in terms of business value creation and protection, and they correlate Flow Metrics with business outcomes. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of your software practices and tools, you need total visibility throughout the software delivery life cycle. Lean product development is a much less developed, researched and applied practice. 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. To optimize the return on investment and the ability to delight customers, each step in the value stream should be creating value in the customer-centric definition of the term. Learning to See. The Key to DevOps Success: Release Management, Mastering Software Delivery with Value Stream Management, comprehensive guide to Value Stream Management, Top 7 Ways to Upgrade Your Organizations Financial Fraud Detection. Teams start by working with the DevOps metrics that capture the throughput and stability of their value streams. Spending all day tracking down data points does not help create value for customers. There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. Peter F. Drucker. There are only so many work items that your developers can work on at any given time. In that sense, the first step is to back up and evaluate what is happening in your organization and how the work that software teams are doing supports the business. measuring process, activity, and operational efficiencies that are indicative of siloed, local optimizations. 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. Or to even know what your value streams are. Work moves back and forth between contributors as it progresses through each phase, morphing, changing, and converging in a highly creative process. This means eliminating waste throughout the SDLC, including test environment management. But how do you know if your software delivery factory is efficiently delivering value to your customer? 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. 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. Whenever there is a product for a customer, there is a value stream. (Rother, M. & Shook, J. The Product Model is crucial here. Let me repeat that the founder of a top-10 Fortune 500 company has his eye on software development teams and the value software innovation brings to the company. Thats why organizations have worked to optimize software development and IT transformations with practices like agile and DevOps. After incorporating the DevOps metrics into your processes, you can begin to integrate flow metrics. This means that governance checklists adapt to the SDLC and become automated using existing tools. Project to Product. Teaching turned to international development and that turned into studying behavioral economics and how to develop great products. 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. At the same time, it continues to be ever more important, as it is a necessary core competency for organizations across industries, no matter their product or service. Built on the lean manufacturing principles that revolutionized productivity in manufacturing in the latter half of the 20th century, value stream management brings lean thinking to software development. McGraw-Hill, p. 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. Thats why you begin with a current state value stream map. Whatever your organizations goals are, achieving them requires the optimization of the value stream. McGraw-Hill, p. If you can present live value streams in a visual form, teams can rally around the dashboards and problem-solve together. IT Revolution, p. In contrast, the software work in the release pipeline strives to be predictable and mechanistic, with minimal output variation and no rework. (Martin, K. & Osterling, M. (2014). Value Stream Mapping. Once you have created your value stream map you can begin to work with your software development and delivery workflow from end-to-end. Its easy for organizations to get started with value stream management. Day to day he combines his love for technology with the excitement of telling people about it. And taking on this challenge can be complicated. Product quality, implementing DevOps, executing SAFe, even increasing release velocity, all require an optimization of value streams to succeed. The Value Stream Metrics, as defined by Gartner in Analyze Value Stream Metrics to Optimize DevOps Delivery include: As you decrease your cycle time and lead time, your throughput will begin to increase. Flow Metrics are constructed from the combined work of all the contributing practitioners across the value stream. Thats why value streams are foundational in both the Project to Product movement and enterprise agility frameworks, like SAFe. Simply put, value streams make complex processes visible and ready to pivot, if needed, to drive more value. How then can a software delivery organization optimize the end-to-end value stream, if its made up of two very different value stream segments? 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. Every CIO and VP of Software Delivery hears their department heads and managers saying they simply have too much work and too little resources. Value stream management is a lean business practice that helps determine the value of software development and delivery efforts and resources. Scott started in engineering, and soon enough that turned into teaching. For example, it is still a struggle just to measure improvement on the DevOps journey. 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. A value stream map enumerates every step of the software value stream. Value stream management platforms (VSMPs) provide a way to monitor and measure team and organizational progress and improvements over extended periods of time. Instead, with value stream management platforms, release managers are able to access the state of work within and across value streams in real-time. The ability to view the data sliced-and-diced through the business lens, so that software delivery performance can be correlated to business results. In this page well focus on how IT organizations can actually do value stream management for software portfolios. Flow efficiency gives you the percentage of time that a work item is actively being worked on during development.