Logic Flow Adapters were added to the platform in this release. These allow users to incorporate business logic into their value streams, based on inputs from multiple different applications. 

Users write and manage custom scripts for these in a single hub, which allows them to create and execute scripts without doing anything in the backend.

Read the full article here on VSM Times.

The post ConnectALL 2.11 introduces Logic Flow Adapters appeared first on SD Times.

Now, the country is in another period of uncertainty. You’ve read the headlines all year: The Great Resignation, layoffs, a possible recession, Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter shaking up marketing spending, introductions of things like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT having workers worrying about their future job security, and more. The list could go on and on, but one thing that would help people through these times is knowing they’ll make it out okay on the other end. 

Unfortunately that level of predictability isn’t always possible in the real world, but in the business world, value stream management can help you with it.

According to Lance Knight, president and COO of ConnectALL, the information you can get from value stream management can help you with predictability. This includes things like understanding how information flows and how you get work done. 

“You can’t really be predictable until you understand how things are getting done,” said Knight. 

He also claimed that predictability is a more important outcome of value stream management than the actual delivery of value, simply because of the fact that “you can’t deliver value unless you have a predictable system.” 

Derek Holt, general manager of Intelligent DevOps at Digital.ai, agreed, adding “If we can democratize the data internally, we can not only get a better view, but we can start to use things like machine learning to predict the future. Like, how do we not just show flow metrics, but how do we find areas for flow acceleration? Not just what are our quality metrics, but how do we drive quality improvement? A big one we’re seeing right now is predicting risk and changing risk. How do you predict that before it happens?”

Knight also said that a value stream is only as effective as the information that you feed into it, so you really need to amplify feedback loops, remove non-value-added activities and add automation. Then once your value stream is optimized, you can realize the benefit of predictability. 

If you’ve already been working with value streams for a while then it may be time to make sure all those pieces are running smoothly and look for areas where there is waste that can be removed. 

Knight also explained the importance of embracing the “holistic part” in value stream management. What he means by this is not just thinking about metrics, but thinking about how you can train people to understand Lean principles so that they can understand how the way they develop software will meet their digital transformation needs. 

Challenges companies face 

Of course, all that is easier said than done. There are still challenges that companies face after adopting value stream management to actually get to the maturity level where they gain that predictability. 

One issue is that there is confusion in the market caused by vendors about what value stream management actually is. “Some people think value stream management is the automation of your DevOps pipeline. Some people think value stream management is the metrics that I get. And there’s confusion between value management and value stream management,” said Knight. 

Knight wants us to remember that value stream management isn’t anything new; It can trace its origins back to Lean Manufacturing created by Toyota in the 1950s in Japan.  

And ultimately, value is just the delivery of goods and services. Putting any other definition on it is just the industry being confused, Knight believes. 

“So people who are trying to implement value streams are getting mixed messages, and that’s the number one challenge with value stream management,” said Knight.

Digital.ai’s Holt explained that another challenge, especially for those just getting started, is getting overwhelmed. 

“Don’t be paralyzed by how big it seems,” said Holt. He recommends companies have early conversations acknowledging that they might get things wrong, and just get started. 

Where has value stream been? Where is it headed? 

In our last Buyer’s Guide on value stream management, the theme was that it aligns business and IT. 

Holt has seen in the past year that companies are adopting mentalities that are less about that alignment. Now the focus is that software is the business and the business is software. 

In this new mentality, metrics have become crucial, so it’s important to have a value stream management system in place that actually enables you to track certain metrics. 

“Things like OKRs continued to kind of explode as a simple means to drive better outcome-based alignment … simple KPIs around objective-based development efforts or outcome-based development efforts,” said Holt. 

Holt also noted that in Digital.ai’s recently published 16th annual State of Agile report, around 40% of respondents had adopted one of these approaches, and that was significantly up from the previous year. 

He went on to explain that companies investing in value stream management want to be sure that their investments are actually paying off, especially in the current economic climate.

He also said value streams can help organizations make small, evolutionary improvements, rather than one big revolution. 

“Value stream management is building on some of the core transformations that happened before,” said Holt. “Wiithout the Agile transformation, there would have been no DevOps, and without Agile and DevOps, there probably wouldn’t be an ability to talk about value stream management.”

So value stream management will continue to build on the successes of the past, while also layering in new trends like low code, explained Holt. 

What sets successful value stream management practices apart

Chris Condo, principal analyst at Forrester, last month wrote a blog post where he laid out the three qualities that set successful value stream management practitioners apart. 

1. Use of AI/ML to predict end dates. According to Condo, development teams with access to predictive capabilities are able to use them to create timelines that are more likely to be met. He noted that the successful teams don’t replace estimates produced by people on their team, but rather augment those estimates with machine estimation. 
2. Bottleneck analysis. Teams can use value stream management to discover what the real cause of their bottlenecks is. “When it comes to VSM, too many clients put the cart before the horse, thinking that they need a high-performing DevOps culture and tool chain to effectively use VSM. None of this could be further from the truth,” said Condo.
3. Strong metrics and KPIs. Development leaders want these metrics if they are going to be putting money into value stream management, so look for vendors that can provide excellent metrics. 

The post Value stream management provides predictability in unpredictable times appeared first on SD Times.

At software companies – which many, many companies are today – the primary role of developers is delivering that value, in the form of new application features that take advantage of changes in the market.

So, what do developers have to do with value stream management?

Read the rest of this article on VSM Times.

The post What role do developers have in value stream management? appeared first on SD Times.

The sneak peek was demonstrated during an SD Times Live! talk by ConnectALL’s COO and president Lance Knight and principal solutions architect Johnathan McGowan. 

McGowan worked through an example of what it’s like when they walk customers through their value stream journey with the fictional CIO Carl, who is new to his position and just found out his budget is getting cut so he needs to figure out how to develop software faster. 

“Well, their software is not being developed any faster,” McGowan explained. “It’s not getting out the door any faster. And now he’s got to do more work. Or at least at the very minimum, the same amount of work with less resources, right? So he’s got to figure out a way to cut all that waste from his value stream. And so it’s a story that  we’re all familiar with here in software development. How can I do more with less?”

According to McGowan, in order to help Carl, they would first build out a map of all of their processes to uncover the bottlenecks. In this step, they were able to identify that one main bottleneck is that defects get logged in several different tools, so developers have to switch between tools and manually copy and paste information.

“We’d like to pride ourselves as multitaskers, but [at] any time we have to shift context from one scenario or one tool to the next. Even if we’re very familiar with it, it still takes time to  switch over to it,” he said. 

Designer can also generate reports with recommendations and impacts so that companies have actionable items to complete to further their value stream management transformation. 

ConnectALL will be releasing Designer on Feb. 1 as a free tool to the community at valuestreammangement.com.

To learn more about Designer and actually watch someone be guided through the process, watch the free SD Times Live! talk, “Do you know the secret about how to map your value stream?”

The post New value stream tool illuminates areas where waste can be eliminated appeared first on SD Times.

Laureen Knudsen, chief transformation officer at Broadcom

ValueOps from Broadcom is the leading Value Stream Management Platform that allows large organizations to deploy and execute a “true” value stream management strategy. Only Broadcom offers an integrated solution with the depth and breadth of capabilities needed to optimize the rapid delivery of customer value, with the scale and customization required by the world’s most complex enterprises.

Unlike other tools and technology that purport to deliver VSM functionality, only Broadcom provides these two key capabilities that are essential for successful execution:

•       The ability for all value stream participants and stakeholders to plan, align, monitor, track, deliver, and optimize work consistently by its most valuable metric – customer value delivered – while still providing the specialized tools and capabilities needed by each individual role or discipline.
•       The ability to extend value streams across the enterprise, beyond their traditional home in IT, DevOps and agile management, encompassing the entire value life cycle from concept to cash.

RELATED CONTENT:
Value Stream Management: The practice that finally unites business and IT
A guide to value stream management tools

Lance Knight, COO at ConnectALL

Have you ever wondered why the vision you have for your business never comes to fruition? If you haven’t, then your executive leadership has. 

At ConnectALL we have noticed that executives are growing increasingly frustrated that the plans they have for their organizations are constantly over budget and plagued with delays. 

Over the years, we have noticed a common theme: Unpredictability.

There are three primary reasons why this is crushing your business today:

1. Lack of visibility into processes makes planning impossible
2. Lack of relevant measurements hinders their ability to understand their processes
3. Lack of automated delivery processes prevent consistency and repeatability

Companies are still struggling to be more predictable. However, we believe value stream management is perfectly positioned to help. We believe that there are three critical pillars to value stream management:

1. See your value stream – Visualize the people, processes, and technology
2. Measure your value stream – Capture the most impactful metrics in real time
3. Automate your value stream – Connect all of your tools to optimize software delivery

Our platform enables humans to see, measure, and automate their software delivery value streams. That said, no tool can manage your value stream for you. Value stream management is still a human endeavor. 

Get started today: https://www.connectall.com/ 

Dominik Rose, VP Product, Value Stream Management at LeanIX 

LeanIX Value Stream Management (VSM) helps enterprises build reliable digital products faster by streamlining operations for engineering managers, DevOps teams and product IT. Leveraging the company’s Continuous Transformation Platform – the de facto standard for managing technology landscapes – LeanIX VSM connects code to business outcomes by establishing end-to-end visibility into software delivery performance. It provides insights to make data-driven decisions to increase productivity through knowledge-sharing and improved collaboration, while eliminating waste based on flow metrics, and measuring business outcomes and streamlining governance.

LeanIX VSM helps engineering leaders, DevOps teams and Product IT speak a common language to address the complexity of different toolsets, cross-functional processes and new ways of working. Software teams can measure real value to the business while reconciling the needs of engineering teams and IT leadership. LeanIX VSM connects knowledge and flow processes to improve the reliability of software, allocate resources more effectively, and make decisions more confidently across the organization.

LeanIX VSM includes integrations that expand its extensive cataloging services to connect source data from disconnected teams, tools and environments. Within one holistic solution, LeanIX VSM provides dashboards and reports so teams can quickly surface bottlenecks that exist in engineering pipelines and public cloud and cloud-native instances (AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, etc.).

Chandra Ranganathan, co-founder and CEO at Opsera

Opsera empowers software and DevOps engineers to deliver software faster, safer and smarter with the first “no-code DevOps orchestration platform” that enables Value Stream Management (VSM) for enterprises.

Opsera orchestrates tools, pipelines and insights by maximizing choice and no-code automation. Through a self-service catalog and tool registry, engineering and DevOps teams can instantly provision and integrate their choice of CI/CD and DevOps tools in their choice of cloud. They can also build scalable no-code pipelines in minutes (for SDLC/software delivery, infrastructure automation and SaaS applications releases), with built-in security, quality and approval gates. Unified and actionable insights are provided with more than 100 KPIs, end-to-end auditing and observability of every tool and task to make troubleshooting, value stream analysis, and compliance a breeze.

Opsera’s capabilities provide significant business value through increased agility and security, as well as reduction of time, cost and risk. Rather than “build it yourself,” developers are freed up to focus on and ship core products faster. Opsera enhances the security, quality and compliance posture of software delivery with a shift-left approach, and increases efficiencies through end-to-end visibility.  Last but not least, Opsera provides greater flexibility compared to “black box” solutions and enables better governance over the CI/CD and DevOps ecosystem.

Prashant Darisi, VP and GM for CEM for Business Solutions at Everbridge

Our Digital Operations Platform is purpose-built to help organizations of any size to support their Value Stream Management initiatives. As a concept, Value Stream Management has existed for many years, but as DevOps transformations are beginning to mature, we have begun to see its importance as part of the software development lifecycle. The key benefits of Value Stream Management are in delivering greater business value, quicker time-to-delivery and the removal of waste and toil from delivery practices.  

Organizations should be focused on thoughtful automation and process simplification that empowers teams to focus their attention on optimizing current solutions and delivering innovative products at scale. Without full visibility of the entire value stream, teams will struggle to identify critical improvement opportunities and solutions.

Our Digital Operations Platform can help organizations:

• Rapidly assess digital service disruptions
• Act quickly on service disruptions before they impact customer experience
• Analyze problems and processes with 360-degree post-mortems
• Continuously improve processes and services
• Gain situational awareness through contextual notifications for fast MTTR

With xMatters, an Everbridge Company you can align technical and business goals while enabling your organization to anticipate and address service issues quickly and confidently. See for yourself by trying xMatters free.

The post How these tools facilitate value stream management appeared first on SD Times.

To that, Lance Knight would say, “Yes, you are. You just don’t know it yet.”

Knight, the COO of value stream platform provider ConnectALL, said if a company is already evaluating their processes and looking for areas of improvement, they’re on the path. Adding the use of tools for value stream management and metrics is important to help you be more efficient at managing your value stream.

For companies creating software – from ideation to production, or code to cloud – they have to make sure there is value in every step of the delivery process, whether the company is measuring those steps in terms of business value or customer experience or financial performance.

RELATED CONTENT:
A guide to value stream management tools
How these tools facilitate value stream management

And Chandra Ranganathan, co-founder and CEO of the no-code DevOps orchestration platform provider Opsera, said in each of those stages there are multiple tools and multiple processes that coordinate the multiple functions that take software from the idea into the hands of the customer.

But the question, he posited, is, “How do you orchestrate all of that in a way that provides the maximum value at every step of the process, and you identify the bottlenecks, the risks, the defects, and remove them right in in an automated and proactive manner?”

That, he said, is what the DevOps value stream is. 

Joining the business and IT

Ranganathan said there is an extension of the value stream that involves integrating development activity into the company’s objectives and the customer experience.

And value stream management, according to Broadcom‘s chief transformation officer Laureen Knudsen, “it’s the first time we’re tying together the top-tier (business) strategy and flowing work and people, through to customer value. And then there’s the feedback of whether or not you provided that customer value.”

For the past 20 years, organizations have worked to gain agility first in development and then through the entire organization. Then DevOps began about 15 years ago. That, Knudsen said, was about getting the operations piece cemented in. “And it’s the business now that needs to come in,” she said. “And everybody is being judged in the same way, on the same goals with the same objectives, rather than being siloed. And that’s the only way to flow things.”

Dominik Rose, VP of Product, Value Stream Management at enterprise architecture software provider LeanIX, has spent many years in his career trying to close the gap between business and IT. “We’re used to seeing that business and IT are not necessarily aligned,” he said. “Looking at it from a software engineer perspective, it’s crazy times.”

On the one hand, he said, if you look into software engineering, you see an industry rapidly advancing in the notion of project to product, using DORA metrics, cloud-native technology and power teams. “There’s so much fun and influence that you can have as a great software engineer today,” Rose said.

But, he continued, the demand on engineering departments is also increasing. “All of a sudden, you need not only to deal with technology, you need to deal with understanding the business,” he said. “And you need to deal with people saying, ‘Can’t we do this with low code? Can we do this with RPA? Do we need the developers?'” The divide between business and IT is still there. And the bridge-building between helping business people to understand what IT is doing and helping IT people to understand what’s important for business, is still there, he noted. “I told my team after a really, really successful week, that we said we want five new customers. And I almost apologized for, hey I’m the business guy. I’m looking into sales. And I need to educate you that this is what’s paying our salary at the end of the day. It’s having this translator function all the time when I talk about things like this.”

Many people agree that you can’t simply buy a tool and suddenly you’re implementing value stream management. So if there’s no magic bullet for getting it done, the question is, ‘How do you begin?’

Everbridge’s Prashant Darisi, VP and GM of the company’s CEM for Business Solutions, said, “We always start with the three P’s: people, then process, then product.” First, it’s important to get everyone in the organization on board with the effort, from the top down, he said. Second, evaluate your processes, to see where things can be done differently, or better, or faster, to be able to accommodate the need for faster delivery. Finally, he said, you need to evaluate your product, to see if that’s what the customers want. “First you have to nail it, then you can scale it,” Darisi said. 

First: People

Value stream management is a human endeavor, Knight often says. “Everybody’s saying we’ve got our value stream management solution. We have a value stream management platform. Yes, sure. But what does it do? It helps the human see, measure and automate. You still need to adopt the principles and understand what you want to do.”

Yet purists like Knight suggest value stream management does not require a massive culture change within an organization to implement it. “This is mapping the value stream, understanding flow, finding waste, and presenting visibility into how things are working. It’s not, ‘we’re in the middle of a culture change.’  This is very black and white, very straightforward.”

Others suggest you can’t achieve value stream success without getting all hands on board with the practice. Everbridge’s Darisi said, start with a culture of training – and it has to be from the CEO down. “How many organizations I’ve been part of where the vice president of engineering or operations or SRE will say, we are adopting this new framework, right? And here’s the methodology we will use, and businesses, we need to do this portfolio management. Then the CEO says, ‘Stop all this nonsense. I want this released by this month.’ So that’s not how we do it. So when I say people, it has to be organization-wide. Then the processes have to be organizational wide, then the products have to be applicable organization wide.”  

Second: Process

Opsera’s Ranganathan said once an organization has embraced a culture of automation, that drives collaboration across multiple teams by reducing risk and costs while increasing speed.

The focus, he said, is to “focus more on business-driven metrics versus just technical metrics. There are metrics like DORA, but how do you piece all of those insights together in a way that actually gives you actionable intelligence that’s aligned to business goals and customer experience? And then there is a closed loop of understanding … did those metrics get met or exceeded? If not, what happened? And, can you insert that back into your product development or SDLC process?”

COVID-19, he continued, has accelerated multicloud for many mainstream enterprises who have stayed away from cloud in the past. They’re adopting cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes and serverless. All that, Ranganathan said, “just becomes complicated for them. How do they deliver software in that ecosystem, so they can do it fast and stay competitive? So they have to now look at other things like shifting left of security and quality in the software delivery process, and to now have insights across the entire ecosystem so you can stay ahead of the curve in a way that you can have predictive insights.” 

This leads to companies using many tools in their SDLC to deliver software, and integrating them in a way that leads to greater insights is vital to value stream management. “

Third: Product

LeanIX’s Rose said IT leaders ask him what value stream management is. “I say, OK, project to product. And I come with Lean management and all the great books there, and they understand what I’m talking about. But this term, value stream management, still doesn’t ring a bell for them.”

Of course, as defined in Mik Kersten’s seminal work, “Project to Product,” it’s a shift in mindset from technical output to business outcome, releasing products that align with customer needs and not simply working on technical projects because you can.

To do that, organizations need first to align product developers with business sales and marketing, to ensure a successful delivery.

Broadcom’s Knudsen said, “I mean if you release a product that is sort of like ‘if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?’ If you release a product and nobody knows about it, you lose. It doesn’t matter how cool it is.”

What’s next for VSM?

There is a lot of messaging regarding value streams and management these days, as analysts and pundits are calling it the evolution of DevOps. But consultants often have different messaging from vendors, and journalists report different – and often seemingly inconsistent – efforts from the field. This mixed messaging could also be responsible for preventing some organizations from even putting a toe in the water.

“We have to stop confusing people,” ConnectALL’s Knight said. “We have to find a way to continue the evangelical stuff. From an industry, we, all of us trying to play in this space, need to say, ‘This is what it is.’ And until that happens, it’s going to remain fractionalized.”

Defining value

In many organizations, one of the first steps to take to derive value from their efforts is to define what value means to them. 

And to define that value, there are at least four pieces of information you need, according to Broadcom’s chief transformation officer Laureen Knudsen: It’s the value you want to create, the feature or service you’re going to create, the metrics you want to judge that value by, and the telemetry you need to gather those metrics. “All four pieces need to be built into the plan from the start, in order to get that value and see whether or not you’re getting it.”

Knudsen said starting in strategy, and not in DevOps, is so important. “We’re talking to customers who are saying, ‘My click rate’s going up. Is that good?’ Well, it’s an insurance app, so is that good? No. But it’s a valid question,” she gave as an example. “They don’t know, they’re just now getting click rates, because that was one of those things that the data people put in and the ops people could grab it.” Her point is that it’s critical to plan all that from the beginning, and then letting that flow through your work.

Another key piece in defining value is defining who the customer is. ConnectALL’s COO Lance Knight said, “People are stuck on the word value. And they’re also stuck on the word customer. Who’s the customer?” If, say, a company refines its value stream to take 20% of waste out of its marketing process so it can afford to spend more marketing dollars with, say, SD Times, who’s the customer? “Value to the company is different than the value to the customer. So until you can define who’s the receiver of the value,” Knight said, you won’t know if you’re delivering value.

Everbridge’s Prashant Darisi, VP and GM for CEM for Business Solutions, said, “You remember this five years ago, vendors would put it on their sheet, three nines availability, four nines availability, and five nines availability, and they would fight on it. And now the customers are saying, ‘Well, duh!'” Now they want to know if the product is easier to use, and if it’s intuitive. So, Darisi said, “I think what’s changing here and what’s driving these concepts, is that one common theme has emerged. That is, what is your customer experience, because that has now become the key driver for purchasing decisions. So if you want revenue, then you have to innovate. If you have to innovate, then you have to focus on the value that you’re delivering to the customer.” 

Why adopt value stream?

Change is hard. Organizations don’t change just for the sake of change; they change because they are unhappy with the status quo. “Why does anybody change,” asked Everbridge’s VP and GM for CEM for Business Solutions Prashant Darisi. “I mean, any 12- step process on this planet – self-help improvement, alcohol or drug addiction_ every 12-step process starts with the first step of being dissatisfied with where you are right now.”

Perhaps the competition is delivering products faster. Or, your company spent three months on design but the level of defect being seen is almost the same. Or, by the time you deliver the product, the customer has changed their mind, or they have a new idea. “It’s fruitless to have a battle about, ‘Oh, we should all change,'” Darisi said. “It’s the same as saying everybody has a car, so I should have a car too. But I have no commute. So I think it needs to start with a simple thing: identification of, is this where you want to be? Is this how you can go where you want to go?” 

So value stream delivery means having the capabilities, through integrated capabilities or the connection of different tools, to do continuous integration, continuous testing, continuous security or deployment. “Those are the tools that are typically called value stream delivery,” said Opsera’s co-founder and CEO Chandra Ranganathan. “Value stream management is to be able to extract the insights from all of these tools that enable delivery, and to provide insights that can then allow you to add business value – understand what’s working, what’s not working, and what can be optimized.”

The holy grail of predictability

Being predictable is a big challenge in software development these days, what with moving requirements, technology decisions changing and people moving on or being moved around.

“How many times have you heard somebody say, ‘Oh, I take the estimate from my engineering team, and then I triple it?'” ConnectALL’s COO Lance Knight said. “Because it’s not predictable. Imagine if they said they’re going to have this done at that time, and here’s why they feel that based upon these metrics, the analysis, the flow – all of that right now I know.”

The problem with being unpredictable is that you can’t efficiently rally the right resources. One of the biggest of those problems, Knight said, is people who are waiting on this thing to be delivered so they can do their jobs – marketing or sales or whatever. “They’re standing around doing nothing if it’s not ready, or if it’s done too soon, their campaign isn’t totally thought out yet,” he explained.” Now you have a product that’s sitting there that nobody’s actually pushing out. That, in itself, is the value.”

While value stream management isn’t the be-all and end-all to getting to predictability, Knight said, it gives you more information and gets you closer and more knowledgeable about what it’s going to take to accomplish something and it makes you closer to being predictable.

The post Value Stream Management: The practice that finally unites business and IT appeared first on SD Times.

Broadcom Software: Broadcom’s innovative ValueOps solution delivers on the promise of value stream management (VSM) as the first to combine business and investment-oriented product management, providing advanced operationally focused agile planning and management capabilities. The integration of Broadcom’s proven Clarity and Rally software products enables every role within an enterprise to fund, manage, track, and analyze unified value streams with a consistent value orientation and methodology. 

ConnectALL: ConnectALL is a value stream management company dedicated to helping customers achieve higher levels of agility, traceability, predictability and velocity. ConnectALL’s services and solutions help organizations to connect people, processes and technology across the software development and delivery value stream, enabling companies to align digital initiatives to business outcomes and improve the speed at which they deliver software. ConnectALL’s value stream management platform allows companies to see, measure and automate their software delivery value streams. 

xMatters/Everbridge: Automate operations workflows, ensure applications are always working, and deliver remarkable products at scale. xMatters combines with Everbridge Critical Event Management to power the industry’s most robust enterprise-wide platform to enable organizations to manage both digital threats, along with physical security, enabling the Fusion Center via a single pane of glass. Over 2.7 million users trust xMatters daily at successful startups and global giants including Athenahealth, BMC Software, Box, Credit Suisse, Danske Bank, Experian, NVIDIA, ViaSat and Vodafone.

RELATED CONTENT:
Value Stream Management: The practice that finally unites business and IT
How these tools facilitate value stream management

LeanIX: LeanIX VSM helps enterprises build reliable digital products faster by connecting code to business outcomes. It establishes end-to-end visibility into software delivery performance so that software teams can measure real business value while reconciling the needs of engineering teams and IT leadership. With this single holistic solution, LeanIX VSM provides dashboards and reports so teams can quickly surface bottlenecks in engineering pipelines and public cloud and cloud-native instances (AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, etc.). 

Opsera: empowers Software and DevOps engineers to deliver faster, safer and smarter with the first “no-code DevOps orchestration platform.” Through a self-service catalog and tool registry, engineering teams can instantly provision and integrate their choice of CI/CD and DevOps tools. In minutes, they can build scalable no-code pipelines with built-in security, quality and approval gates. Unified Insights and end-to-end auditing and observability take the pain out of troubleshooting, value stream analysis, and compliance. 

Allstacks: Allstacks gives software organizations clear visibility into project status, team performance, and trends so users can eliminate surprises in software delivery. Our Value Stream Intelligence Platform generates guiding insights for product stakeholders across  engineering projects and tools so companies can shape better outcomes.

Apptio:Apptio gives you actionable insights to connect your technology investment decisions to drive better business outcomes. Its ApptioOneMX helps manage IT spend; CloudabilityMX connects IT infrastructure with cloud financial management; and TargetProcess, which aligns development resources to business outcomes, and plans and tracks value delivery.

Atlassian: Jira Align extends the power of teams working in Jira by connecting business strategy to technical execution while providing real-time visibility at enterprise scale. It allows enterprises to aggregate team-level data and makes all work visible across the organization in real-time.

The CloudBees platform provides a common data platform to connect all the tools, processes and teams involved in software delivery value streams. This integrated platform provides value stream visibility, tool integration, workflow orchestration, governance and compliance, value stream metrics, value stream analytics, collaboration, and role-specific insights.

Digital.ai: Value stream management and value stream delivery solutions optimize and align the software and delivery life cycle with the needs of the business. Its offerings provide a cohesive, data-driven approach to ideate, create and orchestrate the flow of value with measurable business outcomes. Learn more at www.digital.ai/value-stream.

Kovair: Starting from capturing the voice of the customer and defining what is of value for them, the company’s Value Stream Management Platform provides a structured visualization of the key steps and corresponding data needed to understand and intelligently make improvements that optimize the entire process, not just one section at the expense of another. 

Plandek: Its unique capabilities enable Plandek to integrate with multiple value stream delivery tool sets (e.g. Jira, Git, Jenkins, Azure DevOps) and mine the data footprint of software delivery teams in order to surface meaningful end-to-end delivery metrics used to improve software delivery efficiency, quality, velocity and predictability.

Plutora: Plutora ensures alignment between software development and business strategy and provides visibility, analytics and insights into the entire value stream. Plutora ensures governance and management across the entire portfolio by orchestrating release pipelines, managing hybrid test environments, and orchestrating complex application deployments.

ServiceNow:  The company’s approach to Value Stream Management leverages key capabilities, from ServiceNow DevOps and IT Business Management, and the Now Platform, working seamlessly with IT Service Management, IT Operations Management, and Governance, Risk and Compliance. 

Tasktop: transforms traditional businesses into high-performing tech companies by instantly providing an outside lens for accelerating software delivery. Tasktop’s value stream management platform sits above the entire toolchain, integrating all the underlying tools and objectively measuring flow. 

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ConnectALL’s customers are trying to maximize business value by increasing their software delivery velocity without lowering product quality. Effective test automation has become a critical capability for organizations to deliver high quality software at speed, according to Lance Knight, President and COO, ConnectALL.

“During a digital transformation, organizations are faced with the constant challenge of consolidating data from multiple disparate testing applications,” says Knight. “Failure to do so causes them to miss key insights that provide a full picture of their product quality. As the recognized leaders in tool interoperability and value stream management, we are excited to help our customers by providing enhanced test management support through our platform’s Tricentis Tosca integration. With our platform’s latest capabilities, companies are able to modernize their complete testing toolchain while maintaining end-to-end visibility.”

Utilizing the Tosca adapter with ConnectALL’s Value Stream Management Platform empowers customers to effectively manage their testing life cycles using all the capabilities of Tosca. It allows them to seamlessly transport test results from Tosca directly to the other tools in their environment, creating the necessary set of hierarchies to deliver testing reports for targeted, data-driven decision making.

ConnectALL customers can now fully leverage the benefits of Tosca’s test automation capabilities, quickly and easily achieving seamless integration with virtually any other legacy, modern, or home-grown tool in their software delivery toolchain.

“As an award-winning value stream management platform that facilitates automatic, bi-directional data synchronization among distributed software toolchains, this is a natural fit for our customers. Our Tosca integration will be a welcome addition for QA leadership and QA teams’ arsenal, further propelling the goal of enabling our customers to see, measure, and automate every step in their software delivery value stream,” added Knight.

Connecting Tosca to their existing tools provides many critical benefits for organizations, regardless of their level of maturity in test automation:

• Maintain visibility and traceability during test management modernization efforts. This enables teams to take advantage of the increased efficiencies from test automation without sacrificing governance or quality control.
• Ensure that the right eyes are seeing the testing results by synchronizing the test management data directly into their preferred tools and dashboards.
• Instantly create and send near real-time reports automatically. This saves time by removing the task of manual data entry or exporting/importing/manipulating the data across multiple sources.

ConnectALL’s enhanced integration for Tosca is available now in the Value Stream Management Platform and can be connected to any test tool or all other Agile and DevOps tools.

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These are some of the points made during the ConnectALL opening keynote at the {virtual} VSM DevCon this morning. Andrew Fuqua, VP of Product at ConnectALL, who wrote an article with the same title for SD Times last summer, said that “value streams have been around as long as companies… have produced anything of value for anyone.”

Chris Nowak, director, DevOps Advisory and Adoption at HCL UrbanCode, pointed out that “whether you recognize it or not, value stream is there, and value stream mapping is a way to expose it.”

Fuqua said when he sees the term written in uppercase letters, Fuqua said, “it makes it sound prescriptive. People think it’s well defined, like SAFe (the Scaled Agile Framework), which is a very specific thing.” He went on to say that “the way you manage value streams is any way you want.”

Lance Knight, president and COO at ConnectALL, noted that software won’t manage your value streams. “A human needs to do the management piece,” he said. “The challenge is getting educated on the techniques available today.”

Fuqua added that “the value stream is the flow of work. Managing it is where some human comes along and decides what should flow, and is it flowing well, and evaluate whether there’s some improvement that needs to be had.”

The recording of the keynote is available on the conference website today, and there’s still time to register and catch the rest of the event live. Recordings of all the sessions will be available for the next 30 days if you can’t join in today.

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Lance Knight, COO of ConnectALL, said the industry is making value stream management sound so much simpler than it really is, when in reality it requires teams to start thinking deeper and differently about how their work flows. 

The problem is that organizations are looking at it from a manufacturing or linear perspective, and not entirely from the software development perspective. In software development, value streams are organic, where in manufacturing it is all planned. 

In manufacturing, when a team is working on a physical good, there is a materials manager that manages the shop floor and all the things that flow through it. According to Knight, that manager makes sure the team has all the materials necessary to complete the job. In that space, there are two kinds of flows. One is the materials around the shop floor, and the other is the work item that goes along with the materials. 

In software development, the work effort or raw materials are things like source control, DevOps, testing, code in production, and monitoring. The other stuff is just endless work items, Knight explained. What organizations going down the value stream journey are missing is that each of those things has many different tasks associated with it, creating multiple delivery streams of work items coming together. For instance, if you need to fix a defect, you have to check the code out, go in and modify it, then check it back in and continue down the pipeline. Teams need to look at all these different things happening at the same time down their delivery stream and understanding the feedback loops. 

There are multiple flows. There is the flow of the raw materials, which is code, builds and all of that coming together then the flow of artifacts and work orders. In order to be successful, there has to be an understanding of how work flows and ability to manage the communication between those flows.

“Everyone says it took me five minutes to work on that task, but that is just five minutes on that task. That task was checking the code out, typing things in then it has to go through this other pipeline. I think we have to pay attention to this in order to really remove waste, automate and deliver hard value to customers,” said Knight. 

You need a value stream leader
All the work flows and value streams need to be tracked and mapped. Businesses have tried to throw tools at the problem, but it’s really a human effort, Knight explained. While it is not as easy as it seems, value stream management is not impossible. It just requires a human to go in, look at how work flows, bring it all together, and remove waste. 

As more and more organizations start to tackle their value streams, Knight sees the role of a value stream leader becoming more important than value stream manager. “Just like any other transformation, a leader or vice president says we are doing this and this is why. If you don’t have that then it is never really going to take hold in an organization,” he explained. “You need to really have a value stream leader, not a manager, who is consistently working with teams to lead their way.” 

Knight sees value stream leaders coming from the operation side of things. It has to be a person who is looking at how the software can be delivered quicker, making sure it has relevant value, and getting direction from senior leadership so that they align with the business’ objective and key results. 

“It is not that daunting, it just requires someone to want to look at, want to improve it, want to provide faster software delivery and then automate it,” said Knight.

“A human has to do all that, and then you have value stream management tools that let you take all you learned as a human, automate and connect the dots, and gather the metrics so humans can go look at where the bottlenecks are,” he said. “We are all kind of mixing that up and not looking at the true nature of value stream management, lean or six sigma and what they are there to do. Those are human things. They are not just tools.” 

Lance Knight will keynote at Virtual VSM DevCon, July 22.

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