What is Value Stream Management and Why it’s so Important

Software delivery is only becoming more and more complex. At the very same time, it continues to be ever more important, as it is a mandatory and necessary core competency for organizations across industries, no matter their products or services. Organizations cannot stop at simply becoming a software company, they need to be a very high performing one. And taking on this challenge can be extremely complicated. This is due to the fact that today’s CIOs have a mandate to create more business value with fewer amounts of resources. However, too often, the headlong pursuit of higher productivity in software delivery leads to very well-intentioned initiatives that ultimately fall short of their goals. It is not a small and easy task to align business objectives with IT work, accelerate the software delivery process, and improve the software quality. In many ways, if not one, it is still an uncharted territory. For instance, it is still a struggle just to measure improvement on the DevOps journey. Without a clear roadmap for achieving these gains, many organizations’ software delivery factories become more chaotic and pressure-filled.

That’s where value stream management comes in. Value streams are everything in the software delivery lifecycle (SDLC) from the idea to production needed to the deliver software products or services to customers. Focusing on the value streams makes the value delivered to the customer the cornerstone of the software product development. After all, the software products and services that delight the customers are what fuel the growth of organizations in today’s day. But to manage value streams, organizations need to first gain end-to-end visibility and a control of the multiple, interconnected value streams throughout their portfolios. This type of management has several intentions and objectives that can be achieved with the right solutions:

• Break down operational silos by connecting multiple processes, teams, and tools
• Leverage the real-time metrics
• Enable the cross-team collaboration
• Ensure the governance is embedded into the SDLC processes
• Coordinate and automate the workflows.

All together, value stream management enables and helps the organizations to deliver higher the quality software faster to their customers while reducing and minimizing the risk.

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Systematically speaking, improve your digital transformation journey while scaling Agile and DevOps across the enterprise.

Being a high performing software company is more than the tools put in place. While standing up a CICD pipeline is extremely essential, this infrastructure only creates the potential for a stronger software delivery process and superior DevOps performance. What delivers on that potential is having a very strong, customer-centric product development cycle that without any boundations and seamlessly brings together the efforts of the product owners, release or development managers, risk and compliance teams, as well as engineering teams. When this is done well, a strong end-to-end SDLC enables organizations to continuously improve and better and become a great software company.

Learn about the Value Stream Management and how it can power your software delivery factory

There are some questions which might be bothering you like: But how do you know if your particular software delivery factory is efficiently delivering value to your customer? How can you improve it? Many digital transformations fail or stall and delay because they can’t answer these questions. Either they cannot measure anything, and so can’t identify how to improve and better it, or they simply can’t align and put together software development and delivery efforts with business strategy. The practice of value stream management is meant to answer these questions and help and enable to overcome these common pitfalls. Value stream management involves and inculcates taking a look at all the steps in the software delivery process from idea to production – the value stream – and then also identifying silos, bottlenecks, and other inefficiencies in the flow of work to the customer who is receiving the product. With this information and perspective, enterprises can start to systematically optimize the processes of their software deliveries and ergo realize their digital transformation goals.

What is a software value stream?

A software value stream includes and inculcates every activity – from idea to production – needed to the deliver software products or services to customers timely. Ultimately the value of software products is determined by the customer. Software products or services that continually and always deliver value to customers will, which in turn, drive business value. To optimize the return on the investment and the ability to delight the customers, each step in the value stream should be creating “value” in the customer-centric definition of the term. The meaning of this statement is that as an idea moves into the development, through the build process and into testing, it must be increasing the value to the customer until it is finally delivered. Then, if you’ve done it right, the full value of the effort is realized only later. Anuywho, because software development and the delivery so complex in the large organizations, it can be very difficult to map the value stream from end-to-end. Or to even know what your value streams are or what they mean.

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