Value Stream Management A GUIDE FOR BUYERS
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Value Stream Management: The practice that finally unites business and IT
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ome 86% of respondents to a Broadcom survey on value stream management indicated they are not doing value stream management right now. 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 finan-
BY DAVID RUBINSTEIN cial performance. And Chandra Ranganathan, cofounder 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 inte-
grating 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 continued on page 4 >
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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
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.” z
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 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. continued on page 7 >
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How does your solution facilitate value stream management? 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 success: l 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. l 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.
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 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.
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.).
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< continued from page 4 Chandra Ranganathan, co-founder and CEO of 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: l Rapidly assess digital service disruptions l Act quickly on service disruptions before they impact customer experience l Analyze problems and processes with 360-degree postmortems l Continuously improve processes and services l 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. z
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.”
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“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 cloudnative 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. “
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
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 continued on page 9 >
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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 every-
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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
body 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.” z
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.” z
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. z
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A guide to Value Stream Management tools n
FEATURED PROVIDERS n
n 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. n 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. n 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 enter-
n 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. n 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 aligns development resources to business outcomes. n 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. n CloudBees CD brings order and scale to
prise-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. n 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.). n 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. They can build scalable nocode pipelines with built-in security, quality and approval gates. Unified Insights and end-to-end auditing and observability ease troubleshooting, value stream analysis, and compliance.
enterprise software delivery with release orchestration, deployment automation, and pipeline and environment management. By taking the manual effort and risk out of releasing software, CloudBees CD gives developers the analytics to measure, audit and improve results. n 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. n Kovair: 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. n 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. n Plutora: Plutora ensures alignment between software development and business strategy and provides visibility, analytics and insights into the entire value stream. Plutora orchestrates release pipelines, manages hybrid test environments, and orchestrates complex application deployments. n 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. n Tasktop transforms traditional businesses into high-performing tech companies by providing a 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. z
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