Everything to Know About Value Stream Management
Value stream management is a lean method for monitoring, measuring, and continually improving an organization's ability to offer valued items to customers (VSM). When correctly scaled, VSM may help a firm generate more value through a number of value stream management methods.
Enterprises may benefit from examining their own processes for current initiatives in a variety of ways, from improved collaboration and communication across the whole software delivery lifecycle to actionable insights and metrics backed by real-time data flowing across the business. Consider the following value stream management fundamentals:
Real-time feedback on development teams' everyday operations can aid in the detection and analysis of bottlenecks as they occur.
Product managers may better manage expectations by accurately communicating delivery dates to the rest of the firm and its clients.
By relocating governance concerns to the left, release engineers may help detect risk, reduce rework, and improve quality.
Executives may be able to aid in integrating technical activities with business goals.
VSM is all about making work visible, encouraging good behaviors, and weeding out bad ones so that a development team and organization may prosper faster. VSM is not a new concept, but it has proven to be a vital everyday tool for assuring a high-performing DevOps team in today's digital era.
How Does VSM Work?
One of the key outcomes of value stream management is the continuous evaluation and improvement of the software development lifecycle. To do so, we need to shift the debate away from Agile and DevOps and toward a broader discussion that includes everything from company strategy to customer delivery. Many businesses will start their VSM journey by having an open and honest conversation about their current end-to-end process of value stream insights.
The "fuzzy front end" is where ideas (business value) are picked, planned, architected, and produced, followed by the repeated processes of building, deploying, testing, and releasing to clients.
Effective value stream management necessitates the use of a value stream management platform (VSMP) that collects data from all of the development tools your company uses on a daily basis to generate software. Some of the most frequently collected data types are as follows:
Data from your source control tool should be committed.
Use data from your continuous integration server to create a report.
Any and all testing data that may be used in a build (unit testing, code coverage, static analysis, security scans, etc.)
Information on deployment to all environments
Any automated testing data is collected after the application has been deployed.
What Issues Does VSM Address?
People, processes, and technology are the three DevOps pillars that VSM helps to enhance.
The People Challenge
Teams are working remotely more than ever before, and interacting in a fast-paced development environment is becoming increasingly difficult. "Water cooler" chats are a thing of the past. Because it's not always clear how the team as a whole is performing, standup meetings and retrospectives suffer from value stream insights. It's tough to figure out who is in charge of particular duties, and much more difficult to figure out when those jobs are behind schedule.
VSM for the People
VSM helps make work visible by tracking it in progress, resulting in shared accountability for the software developed as well as enhanced transparency, communication, and cooperation across development, IT/operations, and business teams. In many respects, VSM begins to humanize DevOps by enabling meaningful debate about current procedures and establishing a DevOps culture that promotes problem-solving outside of the box.
Final Thoughts
Teams may make their software delivery procedures smarter and give more value by using a value stream management methodology with value stream management. Instead of depending on a single tool to give insights into the delivery process, you should now combine data from all of your important systems to provide a complete picture of how work is distributed throughout your company.
When you use a data-driven strategy, it also gives your team a perspective on how the entire process works together. By combining this information into a value stream management platform, an automated single source of truth for where work is and a chain of custody to indicate how it has progressed along the value stream may be created. This might shift the meeting's dynamic from reactive to proactive.