This integration is intended to bring together the UiPath Business Automation Platform with Planview’s VSM solution Planview Tasktop Hub. This combination allows teams to enhance their automation of repetitive tasks, minimize manual mistakes, and speed up delivery of products.

Planview Tasktop Hub offers CIOs and transformation leaders the ability to keep track of value flow and business outcomes by combining efficient toolchains with a tech stack that improves productivity, reduces bottlenecks, improves time-to-market, and cuts down on lost revenue.

Read the full story here on VSM Times.

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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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Part of the struggle is an outgrowth of the “shift left” strategy advocated in the DevOps space, leaving developers overwhelmed by tasks such as testing and security that they haven’t been trained for. This has led to a growing sense of developer dissatisfaction as they have less time to write the code for innovative solutions they love to create.

Further, with the rise of cloud native computing, developers in many cases are having to create infrastructure environments for testing, staging and pre-production, which further erodes the time they have to be creative.

When DevOps first came into being, it was thought that these practices could bring developers and operations teams together. In many ways, though, organizations simply shifted a lot of operations functions onto developers. Today, we’re seeing what D2iQ’s VP of Product Dan Ciruli called a “recentralization of control,” as the recently named platform engineering teams (which used to be called infrastructure teams) work to make developers more productive by standing up and running infrastructure for them.

Another trend seen in DevOps this year was around automation. Companies began implementing automation in their CI/CD pipelines, in testing and in identifying and remediating issues throughout the development life cycle. 

On the security side of things, a big trend in 2022 saw organizations creating software bills of materials (SBOMs). These help organizations understand what’s going into the software they’re creating, whether it’s code written in-house or an open-source or third-party component.

DevOps news items making headlines this year include the CD Foundation announcing CDEvents, a vendor-neutral specification for defining the format of event data; the partnership of Opsera and Octopus Deploy to create a no-code DevOps orchestration layer, and a Tasktop-Broadcom partnership to enable companies to better measure their business value.

Also, in March, Codefresh launched its Software Delivery Platform that brings the Argo toolset into a single platform, which the company described as “enterprise-class tooling for Argo, built on GitOps best practices.”

In July, Broadcom announced its plan to acquire VMware for $61 billion, though the deal had yet to be finalized as of late November. And in June, GitLab 15.0 was released with capabilities for  container scanning and speeding up workflows in the WYSIWYG Markdown editor for wikis. 

In the fall, the DevOps Institute, under the direction of Jayne Groll, announced SKILup IT Learning, a subscription-based online education website. The top tier subscription comes with certification preparation video training courses.

Also this year, SD Times published a four-part series from EPAM consultant Jack Maher and V.S. Optima co-founder Pavel Azaletsky explaining DevOps feedback loops. The first, which examines delayed feedback, and the rest of the series can be read here. 

Increasing interest in VSM

This year also saw the increase in both interest and offerings around value stream management.

Value stream management is being touted as a solution above Agile and DevOps that will finally bring the IT side and the business side together, working toward the same goals of delivering value to customers while continuously improving their operations.

According to a Forrester report earlier this year, the number of vendors offering products in this space has about quadrupled from its first report in 2017, when few people had heard of VSM. Now we’re seeing companies entering the space such as Broadcom, ServiceNow and Atlassian creating solutions, to go along with early players ConnectALL, digital.ai, HCL and Plutora.

In July of this year, portfolio management company Planview acquired early leader Tasktop to implement its Flow Framework into its products.

Also this year, SD Times produced its fourth {virtual} VSMcon event. One of the highlights was this talk – using events from the film “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” –  titled, “If you don’t stop to secure DevOps as part of your VSM, you could miss it.”

And, in September, the OASIS open-source standards consortium created a Value Stream Management Interoperability (VSMI) Technical Committee to develop standards for how tools within the DevOps organization can share data between them, allowing for better insights and decisions.

The post DevOps in 2022: Success and struggles appeared first on SD Times.

Dr. Mik Kersten, the CEO of Tasktop Technologies (recently purchased by Planview) and the author of “Project To Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework,” said that he sees companies have made some kind of shift from project to product, albeit more slowly than anticipated. 

In a recent SD Times “What the Dev?” podcast, Kersten said a lot of the focus in value stream has shifted from the “what” and “why” to the “how.” Vendors are trying to figure out how companies are creating their value streams: are they wiring it together in-house as a lot of them tried to do or are they trying to leverage something such as a DevOps vendor?

Click here to read the full article on VSM Times.

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A recent study by Broadcom found that 88% of people say they are doing value stream management, but only 42% say they have anything defined as a value stream. 

A lot of organizations today are focusing on how to eliminate the last few siloes in their organizations, how to get the visibility they’ve been promised their whole product lifecycle, and how to use data effectively and efficiently, according to Knudsen.

To read the full article, visit VSM Times where the article was originally published.

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In his talk at {virtual} VSMcon 2022, Akshay Sharma, CTO at Kovair Software discussed this journey and offered some tips in order to ensure it is done in the right way.

According to Sharma, VSDPs bring the organization fully integrated capabilities in order to allow for the continuous delivery of solutions. However, obtaining value from this is an ongoing journey rather than a single destination.

To learn more about the journey to turn IT into a value center, read the full original article from VSM Times.

The post Turning IT into a value center using VSMP and VSDP solutions appeared first on SD Times.

That was a key takeaway from the recent {virtual} VSMcon 2022, hosted by SD Times last month. What is a value stream? What is value? Which metrics matter? Is it a tooling thing? A people thing?

We empaneled some industry experts at the conference to look at the issue, and the consensus was that value stream management is indeed very useful in providing visibility into your processes, to eliminate bottlenecks and wasted time. It can save your organization time and money, keep your employees working on innovative projects rather than mundane tasks, and deliver engaging products that your customers actually want. There simply is an issue with the way people talk about value stream management – for solution providers talking to potential customers, and for the customers themselves to sell it internally.

Part of the confusion comes from the fact that delivering software is not as straightforward as manufacturing, which is where value stream management got its start. On top of that, delivering software from ideation to release is not a straight line, and there are multiple value streams serving that delivery process. Where do they intersect? Where are the dependencies? How do different teams collaborate?

One of the panelists, Scott Ambler, who’s vice president and chief scientist at the Project Management Institute, acknowledged that any definition of value is by its nature vague, because like beauty, value is in the eye of the beholder. “What is valuable to me is nothing to you, and vice versa. It’s a fuzzy world.”

Ambler would define value as delivering a quality product to customers who want it. He explained: “I see too many people declaring value. ‘Oh, look at this really valuable thing we created,’ but nobody’s interested in it. So it’s valueless. There’s zero value there. Actually negative value there, because you spent all that money and you got nothing for it.”

Then there is the question, “Are you managing value streams, or are you managing value?” This is something Lance Knight, president and COO of solution provider ConnectALL (and Charter Sponsor of VSMcon), speaks about often. “If we understand the difference between value management, and value stream management, I also think we’ll find better success. So, I want to do value stream management, what am I purchasing? What am I going to get? What is my outcome? Here’s a fun one. What’s the value I’m gonna get by implementing value stream management? What’s going to come out of that for me? And so I think that’s why people are struggling with it.”

Knight tries to keep the discussion simple. “Value stream management is pretty succinct and what that is and what it’ll do for you,” he said. VSM helps you find waste, remove it, and automate that process. But, he added, from the vendor side, “We’re all talking about other things that it can do as they try to spin it into what their solutions do. I look at the solution stack. Some of them are just giving metrics, and they’re saying that’s your value stream management solution.”

Another large impediment to value stream adoption is that it’s not a tool you can buy and just plug in and immediately gain efficiencies. It’s about the people in your organization having a willingness to examine what they do and fix things that don’t work.  Jim Benson, CEO of consulting firm Modus Cooperandi, told conference attendees that this is a huge hurdle to clear. “Asking people to do something is one of the best ways to get people to fire you. For me, coming from the Lean side, VSM is the exercise of a lot of interested stakeholders getting together and figuring out what are the steps that we’re taking to create this value? How do we define the value? How do we work together? How do we collaborate with each other to do that work, and then using that as your basis for how you build out your Obeya or your visual controls. So you now have a structure for your work, you have things that are supposed to happen, you know, what you can track, how you can track it and possibly even what some of those metrics should be. We keep selling people that there’s a solution that you can buy. And what VSM is, isn’t that.  It’s the box of random Legos. And you have to build your solution out of it. But yeah, you know, you actually have to show up and do the work and that sentence upsets people.” 

To hear the rest of this conversation, you can listen to the panel, and all the other sessions from the conference, by registering here.

The post Cross-talk hurts VSM adoption appeared first on SD Times.

At {virtual} VSMcon 2022, Bob Davis, chief marketing officer at Plutora, offered practical steps for getting started with value stream management to reduce that feeling of overwhelm.

“We see the difference between the theories of DevOps and Agile and value stream management, and the pragmatic approach to implementing it,” said Davis.

To read more, view the full article, which originally appeared on VSM Times. 

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In his session at {virtual} VSMcon 2022, Adam Dahlgren, SVP of product at Allstacks, said this problem can now become a thing of the past if organizations properly employ value stream intelligence (VSI).

According to Dahlgren, the average organization is bogged down by complexities, which results in 51% of features being delivered late, 47% of projects being over budget, and 38% of projects failing to meet their goals. 

Read the full original article on VSM Times.

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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.

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