What is Value Stream Management and why do you need it?

Editor's Notes

• #5: Vancouver HQ was founded in 2007 and supports customers across Canada, USA, Europe and Australia Among our customers are 43 of the Fortune 100, meaning we are serving some of the largest software delivery organizations in the world. Our customers are 11 of the 25 world’s top banks,4 of the US’s largest issuers, 6 of the top health plans As of today we have around 160 staff We have a large and very sophisticated product suite, supporting 57 tool integrations with 29 technology partners. Customer-centric and partner-centric innovation is one of our core values.
• #6: Epiphany 1: Software productivity declines and thrashing increases as software scales, due to disconnects between the architecture and the value stream. Epiphany 2: Disconnected software value streams are the number-one bottleneck to software productivity at scale. These disconnects span practitioners, the business, and the dated project management model. Epiphany 3: Software value streams are not linear manufacturing processes but complex collaboration networks that need to be aligned to products.[/BL]
• #8: Value stream thinkers ask: How can we provide greater and greater value to our customers - through innovation - while eliminating delays, improving quality, and reducing cost, labor and employee frustration? In terms of optimizing the “build and deploy” stage, Agile and DevOps have been a success, enabling priority features to be built and released into production faster than ever. But what about everything that happens before and after a product has been built and deployed? Any benefits of Agile and DevOps hit a wall if there is no automated flow of work across the end-to-end process.
• #9: Value Stream Management is and why do you need it? VSM is a holistic approach to taking control of an organization’s software delivery value stream to help deliver better business outcomes through IT.
• #30: *At Tasktop we have defined in general terms a set of flow items that we can measure. Flow Items are designed for tracking the most generic characterization of work in a way that is most meaningful to business stakeholders and customers. A Flow Item is a unit of business value pulled by a stakeholder in the software delivery process and they are explicitly tied to new business value. A feature is tied to business value like the delivery of a new epic, user story or requirement. A Defect is a fix or change that improves the quality of the customer experience which is a value add. We have identified two other kinds of work. First, there is work on risks. This includes the various kinds of security, regulatory and compliance that must be scheduled onto development backlogs, implemented, tested, deployed and maintained. In other words, this is work that ultimately competes for priority against Features and Defects. The final and fourth type of work is Technical Debt, it describes the need to perform work on the code base that, if not done, will result in the reduced ability to modify or maintain that code in the future. We will discuss calibrating Flow Distribution a bit later, but for example, a focus primarily on Feature delivery can result in a large accumulation of Tech Debt. If work remains undone to reduce the Tech Debt, then it could impede the future ability to deliver Features by making the software architecture too tangled to innovate on. So it is these flow items that provide us with the abstraction that we need to see business value flow in software delivery.