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What is Value Stream Management?

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Overview

In today's competitive landscape, every organization is a software organization. The ability to deliver value to customers quickly and efficiently is what separates market leaders from the rest. This is the core challenge that Value Stream Management (VSM) aims to solve. VSM is not a tool to be bought but a management practice to be adopted. It provides a strategic approach for improving the flow, quality, and, ultimately, the business value of your software delivery lifecycle.

Within a DevOps context, VSM provides the crucial lens to see the entire development process—from initial idea to production release—as a single, interconnected system. It focuses on identifying and eliminating waste, optimizing flow, and ensuring that every activity contributes directly to delivering value for the end customer.

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Value Stream Management

What is a Value Stream?

A business value stream is the complete sequence of activities an organization undertakes to deliver a product or service to a customer. For an insurance company, this could be the "claims processing" stream, from the first notice of a loss to the final settlement. For an e-commerce company, it could be the "order-to-fulfillment" stream.

In the modern world, these business value streams are powered by software. A digital value stream is the linked set of processes required to build, deliver, and maintain that software. It encompasses every phase:

  • Plan: Ideation, feature definition, and backlog grooming.
  • Build: Coding and committing changes.
  • Test: Continuous integration and quality assurance.
  • Deliver: Deployment and release to end-users.
  • Run: Monitoring, operations, and gathering feedback.

The challenge for most businesses is that they lack visibility into how their digital value streams are performing, making it difficult to pinpoint frustrations, bottlenecks, and delays that ultimately impact the customer. Adopting a VSM mindset helps connect the performance of the digital value stream directly to the health of the business value stream it supports.

How Does Value Stream Management Work in a DevOps Environment?

Applying VSM is a practical, step-by-step process focused on continuous improvement. It harmonizes a company's software delivery efforts by providing a holistic view of the end-to-end process.

Identify and Map the Flow: The first step is to visualize your digital value stream. This involves mapping every major step, handoff, and technology from idea to production. This exercise alone often reveals surprising inefficiencies and silos between teams.

Connect Your Toolchain: VSM doesn't seek to replace your DevOps tools. Instead, it works by integrating with the tools you already use—like Jira for planning, GitLab or GitHub for source control, Jenkins for CI/CD, and Splunk or Datadog for monitoring. It gathers data and metrics from across this toolchain to create a single, unified view of the entire process.

Measure and Analyze: Once connected, you can measure key flow metrics to understand performance. This includes Lead Time (total time from idea to production), Cycle Time (time spent in active development), Throughput (number of work items completed), and identifying where work is piling up (Work in Progress).

Identify and Eliminate Waste: With data-driven insights, you can pinpoint the bottlenecks, delays, and redundant activities that are slowing down delivery. Is too much time spent waiting for test environments? Are approvals taking too long? This is where teams can focus their improvement efforts for maximum impact.

Optimize and Automate: The final step is to take action. This involves automating manual processes, improving collaboration between teams, and creating tight feedback loops to ensure you are continuously learning and refining the value stream.

What are the Benefits of a VSM Approach?

Adopting a VSM mindset helps organizations move beyond simply "doing" Agile and DevOps to truly understanding and optimizing their impact.

  • Data-Driven Decision Making: Shift from governing by gut feel and anecdote to making strategic decisions based on real-time data from your delivery pipeline.
  • Enhanced Visibility: Break down silos and provide every stakeholder, from engineers to business executives, a clear view of the development process, identifying roadblocks and risks before they become critical.
  • Increased Velocity and Flow: By systematically identifying and removing bottlenecks, teams can significantly reduce lead times and increase the predictability and frequency of their software releases.
  • Better Business Alignment: VSM makes the connection between development work and business outcomes explicit. Teams can prioritize work based on value and clearly communicate the impact of their efforts to the wider organization.

Is VSM Right for My Organization?

If your organization is looking to scale its Agile and DevOps transformation, VSM is essential. It provides the macro view needed to move from optimizing individual teams to optimizing the entire system. Consider VSM if you experience challenges like:

  • Difficulty answering the question, "When will it be done?"
  • Frustration between business and IT teams about delivery speed.
  • Releases that are frequently delayed or fail in production.
  • An inability to see where the biggest bottlenecks are in your process.

VSM helps cross-functional teams address these issues by focusing everyone on a shared goal: maximizing the flow of value to the customer.

How VSM Complements Your DevOps Toolchain?

It's crucial to understand that Value Stream Management is a practice enabled by technology, not a replacement for your existing toolchain. A modern VSM approach doesn't ask you to abandon your trusted tools. Instead, it provides a layer of intelligence that integrates with your existing systems.

A strong VSM capability connects the dots between different tools, providing a holistic view that no single tool can offer on its own. It unifies data to facilitate the ability to take action where and when it's needed most, empowering you with insights derived from the systems your teams already use every day.

How OpenText Helps to Implement Value Stream Management?

OpenText Core Software Delivery Platform, from ideation to production and operations. It helps organizations visualize, analyze, and optimize their value streams by integrating disparate tools and data, identifying bottlenecks, waste, and risks, and enabling data-driven decision-making. By consolidating information from various stages like planning, development, testing, and release, the platform empowers teams to align business objectives with development efforts, accelerate delivery, improve quality, and continuously enhance the flow of value to customers.

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