Value Stream Management A GUIDE FOR BUYERS
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January 2021
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Buyers Guide
Value stream management will be a driving force behind successful businesses in 2021
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f 2020 taught businesses anything, it is that they need to be able to adapt at any moment if they want to stay competitive and be successful. But in order to do that, they need actionable insight into what is going on throughout the entire organization and how that is translating into business value. Mik Kersten, CEO and founder Tasktop, says too often when a business takes on a new transformation or reorganization initiative, they end up cutting the wrong people, the wrong services, and making easily avoidable mistakes. “Having a business visible representation of where the value is for the customer, and using that to guide both how you rebalance and how you invest into all of your activities is key,” he explained. That visible representation is now known as value stream management (VSM). It maps people, process, technology and business value to eliminate waste and improve. It’s a new methodol-
BY CHRISTINA CARDOZA ogy that has rapidly been making a name for itself in the software development industry, and that businesses can no longer afford to put off, according to Bob Davis, chief marketing officer for Plutora. “A year ago maybe the question was: is this a good idea? Is this something that I should prioritize? Now, people have to get that if they are going to be successful and competitive in software in their business, they are going to have to get good at software development. In order for them to get good at software development, they are going to have to transform. In order to transform, they are going to have to have visibility. In order to have visibility, they have to have value stream management,” he said. Bryant Schuck, lead product manager for HCL Accelerate, a VSM platform, explained businesses might already be
doing some form of VSM without even knowing it, but 2021 will be the year businesses start taking VSM seriously. “A lot of companies are realizing, especially with how 2020 went, that we need to start looking at our processes,” said Schuck. “The end-to-end picture that VSM can provide is getting much wider. Companies are starting to realize there are bottlenecks outside of development, and are using value stream management beyond the scope of IT or software. It’s an end-to-end methodology that analyzes each facet of the business.”
Where VSM can help your business in 2021 COVID response. As the pandemic continues, organizations are going to need to constantly rebalance and reshift their IT portfolios and reduce or increase budgets to keep up with the changing economy, according to Tasktop’s Kersten. “Organizations realize continued on page 26 >
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that in each of those activities, whether they were actually investing more because the pandemic meant that some of their digital offerings were getting picked up more quickly than before, whether they were rebalancing to adjust with what was happening, or to help their staff whether this is from work from home, or whether they’ve actually cut it, they need a disciplined way, measure way to do it,” he said. Improve Agile and DevOps initiatives. According to Gaurav Rewari, CTO and general manager of AI and VSM at Digital.ai, VSM is the next phase in the “logical evolution” of Agile and DevOps. It completes the vision of the methodologies, he explained. “Agile and DevOps are great, and they serve very, very important needs… but they’re not sufficient,” Rewari said. They serve very specific needs, which was to foster collaboration and be able to have self-organizing, cross-functional teams. But Agile and DevOps are missing the business outcomes and the value piece. Value stream management “really allows a mindset change because it’s about being able to prioritize your software investments based on the value being realized. Trying to track the flow of value across the different steps,” Rewari explained. “It goes from building a product, shipping it, and then having customers adopt it. It suddenly becomes the metric by which decisions are made, and it’s really about aligning the work of technology with the needs of the business.” Better infrastructure. According to David Williams, vice president of product strategy at Quali, one of the benefits of DevOps is that it always encouraged teams to use whatever technology they needed in order to meet their delivery objectives. However, the problem with giving teams that freedom is that if it’s not maintained or managed properly, it can actually slow the whole process down. There needs to be a way to capture any changes being made so tools and technology don’t bog down the process.
“I can’t let 700 teams go out there and just use everything they want and not be accountable to the bottom line. You have to have some controls that have been put in place,” said Williams. “Think about it as you are constantly building Legos. You’re adding more Legos, and you’re only using a subset, but the Legos from the previous build are still there.” What that does, Williams explained, is it causes things to slow down and it takes up infrastructure usage. It needs to be removed so there aren’t any unnecessary pieces in the infrastructure that you weren’t aware of or forgot about. Treating infrastructure as a valuable piece of the life cycle can help businesses optimize spend while managing change and enabling everyone to do their job. “You want to make sure that as things move through the life cycle of an infrastructure, that when you plan it, when the developers develop it, when the testers test it, the release people
release it, whatever the practice is, it’s being maintained and managed in context,” said Williams. The adoption of BizOps. In order to help businesses express and implement their goals as well as connect to the development side of things, the BizOps Manifesto was released at the end of 2020. It’s a framework that addresses the needs of the business and IT, and helps enterprises work towards common outcomes. Some of the guiding principles include: Business outcomes are the primary measure of success; and business leaders need to make informed technology investment decisions that drive business growth, improve customer experience and increase profitability. According to Tasktop’s Kersten, this
idea of BizOps will be closely tied to VSM in 2021. “Fundamentally, what knowledge management is about is making the key metrics, the value streams themselves, visible to the business. BizOps is a way of expressing that,” he said. Those goals of BizOps cannot be possible without value stream management. “It’s not enough to do Agile and DevOps to do BizOps, you have to be applying the principles and implementing the infrastructure, tooling and visibility that value management provides,” Kersten added.
What can you expect to come out of the VSM space in 2021? More education and training. Now that organizations are aware of VSM and all the benefits it can bring, it’s time to fill in some of the missing pieces — mainly education and training, according to Lance Knight, COO for the value stream integration platform ConnectALL. “Everyone is saying ‘I’ve got a tool. I’ve got the tool,’ but nobody says I’ve got the tool services to help you be effective at it,” Knight explained. “We are still trying to figure out what VSM is and how to do it.” Knight looks at 2020 as the year of awareness for value stream management. And now that everyone is realizing they should be doing this, it’s time to think about how to effectively do it. He explained that there is no “VSM for Dummies” book yet, or really any ways to get certified in this area. As more vendors come out releasing new VSM capabilities, businesses need to be educated on what they want to achieve, and how the tool will help them. “You need someone who is going to educate and help you understand it, without charging a large fee,” said Knight. “Value stream management is human….we need to help engineers. The humans need to understand the methods and the processes to remove waste. We all have to understand that we have to train and educate and formalize what it means to be a value stream managecontinued on page 28 >
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Value stream management platforms vs. value stream delivery platforms
Research firm Gartner splits the value stream management tooling landscape into two areas: value stream management platforms and value stream delivery platforms. According to the research firm, “DevOps value stream management platforms (VSMPs) enable organizations to optimize end-to-end product delivery lead time. These platforms provide greater visibility and traceability into the flow of all product delivery processes, from ideation to release and operation.” While, “DevOps value stream delivery platforms (VSDPs) provide a fully integrated set of capabilities to enable continuous delivery of software. These capabilities may include project or product planning, build automation, continuous integration, test automation, continuous deployment and rollback, release orchestration, and automated security policy enforcement, and may provide visibility to key value stream metrics.” Gartner believes VSMPs should be used: • To get end-to-end visibility and insight into product delivery • Assess the performance, quality and value of products • Evaluate the maturity of existing product delivery capabilities • Identify constraints to flow and gaps in insights
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ment expert.” It’s like having a great car in the driveway, but if you don’t have a driver’s license what’s the point? Knight explained. “That’s where I see value stream management going… to people getting their VSM driver’s license.” More AI being applied to the space. According to Gartner, predictive analytics are going to be a key capability being offered in value stream management tools as “organizations are increasingly embracing the value of analytics to ensure successful deployments and demonstrate reduced production defects.” Digital.ai is already dedicated to giving its users more AI capabilities in 2021. The company just announced four new patents: automated health assessment and outage prediction; warehousebased reporting and operational reporting integration; input gathering system and method for defining, refining or validated star schema for a source database; and model-driven reporting. “Given today’s volatility, many enter-
• To get customized dashboards and view product delivery • For a consolidated view of governance, security and compliance • And for advanced capabilities such as risk analytics Don’t use a VSMP: until you have proper experience and success with DevOps software delivery, and when you need a platform for the entire organization and its many stakeholders, according to Gartner. Gartner believes VSDPs should be used when • The benefit of a fully integrated platform outweighs the cost and effort to manage a complex toolchain • Specialized VSDP capabilities in one area of the application delivery value stream are essential • The licensing and pricing advantages of VSDPs make it more attractive than stitching together a complex DevOps toolchain through multiple vendor relationships. Users should not use DevOps VSDPs when choice dictates app architecture; VSDPs don’t integrate with essential tools to support missing gaps; and if product teams aren’t ready to replace existing tools, according to Gartner. z
prises have either slowed down or paused updates to their applications. However, their customers are relying on them to innovate more now than ever before. The capabilities represented by these patents enable IT organizations to continue to rapidly drive value for their customers while mitigating risk to the business,” said Rewari. Plutora’s Davis also sees a trend towards predictive analytics. “The good news is you now have all this information. The bad news is, you now have all this information. How do you take that information and make meaningful insights out of it?” asked Davis. He sees more of a move toward capabilities that help users understand their data better and make smarter decisions. Standardization. As more vendors try to come into the space, there needs to be a way to standardize or formalize the capabilities so people don’t get confused, according to Davis. “We have to standardize… integrations can’t be the differentiator,” he said. Everyone should have integrations because they are so critical to connecting the tools
and gaining the awareness of what’s going on. “There is going to be a lot of need to better standardize, better understand the differences between simple field mapping and complicated logic in terms of how these tools are being used,” he said. VSM 2.0. We are still in the early stages or 1.0 phase of value stream management, but HCL’s Schuck sees VSM 2.0 on the horizon. “We are close to crossing the line of value stream management being a nice to have or cool new thing to VSM becoming an essential in your toolbox,” he explained. “VSM 2.0 comes with customer success, customer use cases, and VSM coaches. Right now, we’re in the thought leadership stage with lots of DevOps experts talking about the benefits of VSM and practitioners testing the VSM waters. We’ll see more people diving into value stream management once big companies have well-established VSM programs, broadcast their results from these programs, and start hiring VSM coaches or other VSM-specific roles.” z
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Lance Knight, COO for the value stream integration platform ConnectALL The goal is to help you understand software delivery, to look at things through the lens of a value stream, to look for ways to remove dependencies, understand where your bottlenecks are, and do that from a business value mindset. If I can bring in ConnectALL and hook up everything in your value stream to see this information, the analytics, the orchestration that’s great, but you won’t know what to do with it. I think the next phase is actually finding a way to educate people and give them the knowledge not to buy a value stream management solution, but to know how to hold a value stream optimization workshop or how to implement value stream management principles in organization, and nobody’s sat down to define those. We are going to be converting valuestreammanagement.com into just that — into a type of training body where people can get some education and go learn about it. We also have value stream management consultants. We can go look at your end-to-end delivery, look at how information flows, and make recommendations. We are trying to help the market mature, and at the same time the solution will come along for it. If I can educate the world, if I can help put together programs that help everybody understand why this is important, how to hold a value stream management optimization session, which we are doing now, and how to use that information then I can improve flow. Gaurav Rewari, CTO and general manager of AI and VSM at Digital.ai Value stream management (VSM) enables organizations to drive digital transformation by focusing not only on the flow of work, but also the flow of value across the business. With VSM, businesses deliver products and services that achieve strategic goals and provide better customer outcomes. While the idea of a value stream platform gives the impression of a single, unified entity, the reality is that for most organizations
there are typically two separate value stream efforts or approaches that occur: value stream management and value stream delivery. Digital.ai value stream delivery solutions connect strategic agile planning to DevOps software delivery to provide a complete end-to-end process from ideation through production. This approach enables organizations to automate release processes to deliver software faster, more reliably, and with greater visibility. What’s more, by collecting data from across the lifecycle and applying AI-based analytics, Digital.ai enables IT organizations to continuously improve process, tools, and technologies. Digital.ai also provides security, governance, and traceability to ensure compliance and adherence to best practices and standards. Digital.ai value stream management solutions align the software lifecycle with the needs of the business, creating a unified, data-driven view that improves visibility and decision making throughout the organization. Digital.ai value stream management solutions collect data from across the software lifecycle, providing deep insights and enabling AI/ML-powered predictive analytics. These insights enable businesses to prioritize product backlogs based upon the value being delivered, identify and remove bottlenecks, predict and mitigate risk, and so much more.
Bryant Schuck, lead product manager for HCL Accelerate, a VSM platform It all comes down to people. You need buy in at all levels, alignments between teams, and trust in the process.
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With value stream management being so new to the software space, you’re going to get a lot of pushback that the metrics brought forward aren’t what you should be measuring. You have to balance capturing key core metrics with trusting that these new metrics are what the business should care about and what teams should focus on. Overall, you need to shift the conversation toward outcomes rather than outputs. HCL Accelerate was built to automate the delivery and interpretation of data so businesses can make faster, more strategic decisions. Typically, teams within an organization use the tools they prefer, which creates silos, gaps, and tribal knowledge about what processes are in place and how they work. HCL Accelerate combines all the data from all these teams and tools to add that single microlevel traceability on each piece of value to allow businesses to align and govern across many applications and tools to deliver faster with better quality. Instead of reaching out to several people for one piece of information, you can find all the answers to your pipeline questions instantly in HCL Accelerate. HCL Accelerate isn’t just about visibility — yes that’s a great benefit, but what we’re really using all this aggregated information for is to automate governance and streamline processes. Bob Davis, chief marketing officer for the value stream management platform Plutora We see fundamentally three main challenges that organizations struggle with. 1. They don’t have visibility across the pipeline. 2. They don’t have visibility across the portfolio and 3. They aren’t able to connect diverse methodologies. Furthermore, these three challenges conspire against improvement. If you don’t have visibility across your entire portfolio, you can’t manage your strategic outcomes, or understand how your development processes are performing in achieving those outcomes. And all of this visibility and management is needed regardless of the tools being used — they all need continued on page 35 >
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A guide to value stream management solutions n
FEATURED PROVIDERS n
n ConnectALL is a value stream management company dedicated to helping customers achieve higher levels of agility, traceability, predictability and velocity. We do this by connecting 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 solutions and services allow companies to see, measure and automate their software delivery value streams. n Digital.ai value stream management and value stream delivery solutions optimize and align the software and delivery lifecycle with the needs of the business, improving visibility and decision making throughout the organization. Its offerings provide global enterprises and government industry leaders 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 n HCL Accelerate is a data-driven value stream management platform that provides next-level visibility and governance to your DevOps strategy. By integrating with the tools you’re already using, HCL Accelerate aggregates data from across your DevOps pipeline to give you actionable insights so you can get the most out of your DevOps investments. HCL Accelerate is part of HCL Software DevOps, a comprehensive DevOps product suite comprised of powerful, industry-proven software solutions. n Plutora provides value stream management solutions for enterprise IT, improving the transparency, speed and quality of software development and delivery by correlating data from across the toolchains and analyzing critical indicators of every aspect of the delivery process. Acting as the “catwalk above the factory floor,” Plutora ensures organizational alignment between software development with business strategy and provides visibility, analytics and insights into the entire value stream. This approach guides continuous improvement and digital transformation progress through the measured outcomes of each effort. Plutora ensures governance and management across the entire portfolio by orchestrating release pipelines, managing hybrid test environments, and orchestrating complex application deployments — all independent of methodology, team structure, technology, and level of automation. n Tasktop transforms traditional businesses into high-performing tech companies by instantly providing an outside lens for accelerating software delivery. Many organizations are flying blind when it comes to digital transformations because the tools used to do the work provide limited views and proxy metrics. Tasktop’s Value Stream Management platform sits above the entire toolchain, integrating all the underlying tools and objectively measuring flow. Within days, Tasktop customers are able to understand the way they are delivering value and where to implement changes that reduce time-to-market. n Quali CloudShell Colony is a SaaS platform for delivering Infrastructure Automation at Scale for complex application-centric environments on cloud technologies including AWS, Azure, and Kubernetes. IT leaders and DevOps innovators around the world trust Quali to enable self-service automation and governance to streamline application development, testing, and release to production. z
n Atlassian offers Jira Software, the #1 software development tool used by agile teams. As an agile project management tool, it helps teams plan, track and move work forward. Atlassian’s Jira Align extends the power of teams working in Jira by connecting business strategy to technical execution while providing realtime visibility at enterprise scale. It allows enterprises to aggregate team-level data and makes all work visible across the organization in real-time. n Blueprint accelerates agile transformation and drives real business value through value stream mapping. It can map, visualize, measure and govern the flow of business value from ideation to delivery. Its governance and compliance capabilities not only supports regulatory processes by mapping requirements, but provides traceability and impact analytics. n CloudBees CD brings order and scale to enterprise software delivery with release orchestration, deployment automation, and pipeline and environment management all in a single, flexible solution. By taking the manual effort and risk out of releasing software, CloudBees CD gives developers the analytics to measure, audit and improve results. Organizations with highly regulated and complex environments can safely and predictably release new applications and adapt to change at any speed demanded by the business. CloudBees CD also includes a robust set of audit-ready pipeline capabilities so customers can easily perform software delivery audits based on evidence links, approvals and pipeline duration. n IBM UrbanCode Velocity provides value stream management, pipeline orchestration and real-time analytic capabilities. It is designed to help development teams, DevOps teams and business leaders visualize work and create value from idea to customer. n Intland: codeBeamer ALM is a holistically integrated Application Lifecycle Management tool that facilitates collaboration, increases transparency, and helps align software development processes continued on page 35 >
The Proven Platform for Accelerating Software Delivery.
Unplanned work
Context switching
Too much WIP Conflicting priorities
Invisible dependencies
Align with business goals and communicate with metrics understood organization wide. Tasktop is the only value stream management platform that transforms traditional businesses into high-performing tech companies with an outside lens for accelerating software delivery at scale. Fortune 500 companies rely on Tasktop to quickly understand the way they are delivering value and where to implement changes that reduce time-to-market. Named a leader in Value Stream Management solutions in the Forrester Wave: Value Stream Management Solutions, Q3 2020 and the GigaOm 2020 Radar Report on VSM
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< continued from page 31 to be integrated into the value stream management platform. Plutora provides deep tool integration that populates our rich common data model and is the backbone of our platform. The resulting converged toolchain operates as one, with critical information and actions orchestrated across the different tool sets and methodologies. It supports a complete set of dashboards and analytics. But we don’t stop there. With what we call our action layer, we help customers orchestrate and manage release pipelines. We help them with the governance and compliance that is so often required. We help them manage their pre-production test environments. We help them incorporate requirements that are outside of the toolchain itself, such as security or architectural reviews, that come up along the way, and in doing so, help accelerate and improve software delivery. David Williams, vice president of product strategy at Quali, a infrastructure automation company To be successful, IT infrastructure cannot be assumed, you have to make sure it is enabled to ensure the delivery of the business’ outcome objectives. The infrastructure supports all DevOps practices, and as such must be accountable to delivering value to different individuals, teams, functions and types of DevOps practices. For example, small DevOps teams will need IT infrastructure automation tools that allow them to do a broad range of things, no matter how complex the infrastructure stack becomes. This means providing capabilities that enable them to do everything like providing technology with guardrails, guidance, automation, and intelligence to optimize the skills within each team. For DevOps teams that are larger with more focused skills, you must be able to build the capabilities and the technology that enable them to go deep, but also extract it up to be shared across different teams. Success is based upon using the technology that meets the requirements of the organization you currently have. And then using the value you get from that and expanding to the left and the right throughout the continual DevOps process. You should provide a capability that will grow as you grow your DevOps matu-
rity. It should bring your teams together and enable you to get control. It’s tactical. It’s about scalability. It’s the ability to be able to say no matter where you are in the maturity of your organization, you have the technology that can help you. Quali provides a modern infrastructure automation platform with all the guardrails allowing DevOps teams to execute more efficiently without taking away the control they need. That’s what we do at Quali. We look at the infrastructure requirements and decisions being made today, evaluate the impact of near- and longer-term infrastructure change and deliver the platform to allow organizations to leverage what they use now while ensuring the management of the IT infrastructure immediately adapts and delivers on future market, organizational, and strategic business needs. Dr. Mik Kersten, CEO and founder of value stream management solution provider Tasktop The best practice we’re seeing is just to start measuring. Basically, find whatever the key metric is that is the most important thing to you as a business. Find that North Star for yourself. For some companies, that might be bringing more features and innovations to market faster or making customers happier and more engaged with their products and services. Find that identifier, and then use the Flow Metrics to tie it into everything that you’re doing, and just start measuring. For example, where speed to business value is most important, that’s going to be measured with Flow Time. The entire goal for you, for your technical teams and for your leadership teams is just shortening that Flow Time — and to do it in a measured way. Ask if you got the impediments out of the way of the development team, of the operations team, of the testing team, of the product managers or business analysts. Everything becomes centered around that one key result you are after — reducing the Flow Time from, let’s say four months to four days, so you can innovate at the pace of a tech giant or startup. That’s exactly where we’re focusing all of our efforts at Tasktop: making sure that the journey is measurable, fast and measuring the rate of improvement. It’s all about data-driven continuous improvement. The key is to start your journey and to start measuring it. z
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< continued from page 32 with your strategic business objectives. n Kovair with its tools provides a complete Value Stream Management Platform to organizations enabling them to reap every benefit of Value Stream Management and ensure customer satisfaction. Starting from capturing the voice of the customer and defining what is of value for them, Kovair’s VSMP 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’s unique capabilities enable it to integrate with multiple Value Stream Delivery tools-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. n Planview ensures teams are doing their best to deliver on strategy. The company offers portfolio and work management solutions to transform and drive strategic initiatives. Its portfolio includes Spigit for culture innovation and employee engagement; Enterprise One for enterprise-wide portfolio planning and delivery; PPM Pro for work management; LeanKit for enterprise Kanban for IT and business teams; and Projectplace for project-centric collaboration. n The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is the leading framework for scaling Agile across the enterprise. It is designed to help businesses deliver value on a regular and predictable schedule. It includes a knowledge base of proven principles and practices for supporting enterprise agility. n ServiceNow’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 Targetprocess: To connect portfolio, products and teams, Targetprocess offers a visual platform to help you adopt and scale Agile across your enterprise. Use SAFe, LeSS or implement your own framework to achieve business agility and see the value flow through the entire organization. z
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