The new dashboard provides an overall view of metrics like DORA and flow metrics. By tracking these metrics over a period of time, development teams will be able to locate trends early, drill down into individual metrics, take action to improve performance, and track innovation investments. 

And, going up the chain, business leaders can also look at these metrics to eliminate bottlenecks and make decisions like where to add resources to support developers.

Read the full story on VSM Times.

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Software development is a business differentiator that requires strategic investments to improve the bottom line. Having worked in all aspects of the software development lifecycle, I know most people in the industry think in terms of two types of deliverables – creating new features and fixing bugs. In reality, that’s too limiting. I hear management complain that developer productivity is down simply because developers are responsible for what appears to be everything now and may spend less than 50% of their time writing code. The amount of time a developer has available for coding is tracked, but many other activities are hidden and considered “tax” of the organization, like caretaking the pipeline, fixing problems with your environment and helping testers.

Developers want to write code. The business wants them to write code. Customers want the solutions their code provides. That means we need to understand where developer time is actually being spent and give them an opportunity to write code for time-consuming manual activities that can be automated. 

Four fundamental development categories  

For product management to be effective, four types of work need to be visible, supported, and funded. 

Features. Delivering cutting-edge features is the fun part of a developer’s job. Creativity takes time and delighting customers isn’t easy in highly-competitive markets. Resources need to be invested in developing new or improved functionality, usability, flexibility, and other customer-friendly features. 

Defects. I’ve heard it said that today’s features are tomorrow’s bugs. Fixing defects, bugs, and other issues is a routine part of software development. Releases often go out with bugs, so your team may be putting out fires related to your releases and those of your vendors and partners. Identifying and eliminating problems that hurt the customer experience is important, but they need to be weighed against other priorities. 

Risk. Risk-related activities represent the majority of the hidden work that developers do. Improving the software engine to produce more reliably involves setting up guardrails and security for better deployment. DevOps practices push for complete automation of manual checklists that have been used to validate items, including whitesource library checks, open source license validation, testing, deployments, and code analysis. Developers WANT to automate them, and implementing code that does the checks is fun. 

Technical debt. As soon as something is built, the need for modernization is a possibility as the world changes. The technology gap between modern standards and legacy systems grows over time, so it’s important to regularly assess the tradeoffs between investing in patches or updates and rethinking the design given new learnings and needs. This includes build vs buy decisions. 

Balancing development work investments

Peter Hyde of Gartner defines a work profile as, “The proportion of each type of work item delivered in a time period by the software value stream.” Too much focus on one area can throw the organization out of balance, making it harder to deliver customer value. For example, if too much time is focused on features/defects, you’ll end up with a fragile development environment straddled with technical debt, ultimately killing its ability to deliver new features.

Start by identifying the percentage of your resources going into adding features, fixing defects, reducing risk, and addressing technical debt to understand your current work profile, which is also known as your work distribution. This may take some digging if visibility is lacking, especially if everything is currently being categorized under features or defects. This will give you a baseline for analysis and allocation of future spending, which is based on your goals. 

If the goal is to make significant future investments into sets of components, continual modernization of the technology base (technical debt) and refinement of the software delivery engine (risk) will reduce the overall “cost” and time of delivering new features or fixing bugs. Investments into risk may also increase the ability to obtain certifications, improve agility to react to outages, reduce MTTR, and boost customer trust.  

Ultimately the team, typically driven by product, must make tradeoffs with the limited resources they have. The team needs a way to tradeoff investing into better security automation vs improving the technology stack vs just adding features and fixing bugs.

Connecting value stream management and outcome mapping 

Outcomes are the core of delivering value to the customer, and every outcome can be supported by one of the four types of work. Teams should think hard about the outcomes they are working towards. They need to clarify why items are important, identify obstacles, explore how to learn more, and identify how to measure progress towards the outcomes. 

The work of product management is central to translating the outcomes into the core work types. Ultimately they are responsible for justifying and defending investment decisions.  Value stream management helps in this journey by providing the data and associated visualizations connected to outcomes.

Investment strategy advice

Balancing work is essential to effective product management. Start with your outcomes, but communicate in terms of the work distribution. You know the strategy you’re trying to accomplish from a business perspective. Translate that for your individual product managers, so they can connect those business outcomes to actual work that has to get done. 

To keep everyone on the same page, train your executive team on how to translate outcomes to the work profiles, and proactively sell why the tradeoffs were made in the first place between the various types of work. Finding the right balance will make a developer’s job more enjoyable while also improving customer value.

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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. 

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“There’s nothing wrong with value stream management itself, but there’s plenty wrong with how it’s being considered and discussed by others, who often conflate it with either Agile or value management,” said Andrew Fuqua, SVP of Products at ConnectALL in the SD Times Live! webinar, You’ve Heard What Value Stream Management Isn’t. Now Hear the Truth About What It Is. “They’re not the same thing.”

The definition of value stream has been around for a very long time and it encompasses value-added and non-value-added activities that are required to take products or services from raw materials to the waiting arms of the customer, according to Lance Knight, president and COO at ConnectALL. At the high level of software development, this is the idea, planning, building, testing, and deploying.

To continue, read the original article on VSM Times.

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According to the committee, organizations typically employ a number of different tools to measure software performance in order to maximize innovation, drive growth, and add value.

Led by Helen Beal, chair of the Value Stream Management Consortium and chief ambassador at the DevOps Institute, and Kelly Cullinane, director of energy and federal services at Copado, the Value Stream Management Interoperability (VSMI) Technical Committee aims to bring increased interoperability between these tools. This will enable a more secure approach to sharing data across platforms.

According to Beal, value stream management (VSM) is the next evolution of DevOps, and “pivotal to that is the DevOps tool chain and at the Consortium, we talked about the need for a common data model,” she said.

To read the full article, find it on VSM Times.

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In order to do value stream successfully, however, companies need to understand the difference between value stream metrics and engineering productivity or source code quality metrics. 

According to Manjunath (Manju) Bhat, research VP at Gartner, traditional DevOps metrics like release cadence, lead time, and cycle time can be useful measurements, but they don’t necessarily demonstrate business value. 

RELATED CONTENT: What role do developers play in value stream management?

“Our goal is not to accelerate release cadence but continually improve value delivery cadence – i.e., the rate at which users can absorb and appreciate the value delivered,” said Bhat. 

Over the past year, there have been a number of partnerships between value stream management companies and technology companies, which may be an indication that value stream companies are trying to sync up value stream data with other important metrics. 

For example, in March, Tasktop and Broadcom announced a partnership in which Tasktop’s technology would enable syncing of data between Broadcom’s ValueOps solution and software development tools. 

That same month, software intelligence company CAST and value stream management company LeanIX announced a partnership that was aimed at supporting customers in their data migration to the cloud. Together the two solutions would enable companies to make more informed decisions and develop more effective software strategies. 

According to Bhat, partnerships such as these bring “complementary value from across different tiers and vantage points.” He noted that most value stream management platforms are approaching the market from a position of strength that already exists, and then they build out their capabilities. 

Bhat believes that the value stream providers who are able to help organizations elevate customer satisfaction, employee happiness, and automation maturity will be the leaders in the market. 

The post Don’t conflate value stream metrics with other development metrics appeared first on SD Times.

In an SD Times Live! event, Charles ‘Scot’ Garrison, SVP of operations and customer success at ConnectALL, and Lance Knight, president and COO of ConnectALL, talked about how value stream management has spent the past two decades transitioning from manufacturing to software development uses, and what’s changed along the way. 

Prior to joining ConnectALL, Scot worked at a company that manufactured dispensers and pumps for gas. He explained that back in the day, the term value stream management didn’t actually exist yet, but there was value stream mapping, which was a tool used alongside Kaizans, which is another method of improving processes within the business.

“[Value stream mapping was a tool] that was either used to go look in an area on a manufacturing floor and map out current state process and understand what your cycle times were, and then look at how you can start eliminating waste, improving efficiencies in the future state process,” said Scot. 

To learn a bit more about their experiences in manufacturing and how value stream management was present there, read the full article which was originally posted on VSM Times.

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Trying to handle security with DevOps these days can sometimes leave us thinking like Ferris Bueller: “How could I be expected to handle school on a day like this?” from the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” 

However, the movie can teach a lot about how some of the biggest challenges of securing DevOps can be solved, according to Rob Cuddy, global application security evangelist at HCL Software, in the talk “DevOps Moves Pretty Fast. If You Don’t Stop and Secure It Once In a While, You Could Miss It” at VSMcon 2022. 

Read more in the original article on VSM Times.

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Tasktop’s technology will power Broadcom’s ValueOps Connectors, which will synchronize data between software development tools and Broadcom’s ValueOps Value Stream Management Solution.

According to the companies, this solution will provide companies with the ability to collect and unify their value stream data. 

Key benefits will include extracting siloed data to create complete data sets, increased team collaboration, and reduction of errors related to manual data collection. 

 “Every business is a software business and accessible, reliable data is needed to derive value during the software delivery process. This requires solutions to connect technology and the business with the right metrics to enable more effective enterprise digital transformation,” said Mik Kersten, CEO at Tasktop. “Broadcom’s ValueOps Connectors powered by Tasktop help uncover data lost in silos, the key to unlocking all information needed for effective value stream management.”

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“The Micro Focus ValueEdge Platform enables organizations to conceptualize and visualize the creation of value through the critical phases of a software product lifecycle,” said Rohit De Souza, SVP and GM of ADM at Micro Focus. “We see value stream management as an absolute game changer that will transform how companies assess, plan, and manage how applications are created and delivered to achieve superior business outcomes.”

It includes end-to-end VSM so that companies can improve their process from strategy all the way through to delivery.

ValueEdge has a cloud-based architecture, which allows it to be quickly deployed and can scale easily as needed. 

Analytics capabilities will provide companies with actionable insights that can be used to optimize processes.

Other capabilities ValueEdge provides include end-to-end traceability, functional testing, and over 100 application integrations. 

The initial release includes the modules:

• ValueEdge Insights
• ValueEdge Agile
• ValueEdge Quality
• ValueEdge Release

The company is planning on releasing four more modules for the platform later this year.  

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