Optimize value stream efficiency to do more with less, faster
In a world where software defines the pace of innovation, organizations must excel at developing, securing, and deploying software. Companies must be experts in all three, or they will be disrupted by those who are. And in our current economic climate, they need to undergo these digital transformations while also cutting costs, being more efficient, and doing more with less.
Value stream management can be the antidote to these challenges, helping teams accelerate time to market, overcome obstacles such as handoffs and broken feedback loops, and improve visibility across the business to deliver high-quality customer experiences.
Transformation Goals: The Four Typical Outcomes
Over the past year, I’ve participated in more than 10 executive round tables, spoken to countless customers from around the world, and taken input from organizations such as the DevOps Institute and the Value Stream Management Consortium.
The common theme that has emerged when discussing transformation goals with industry leaders is that they recognize their organization can’t stop at becoming a software company -- they need to be a high-performing one.
While it’s no small task to align business objectives with IT work, accelerate the software delivery process, and improve software quality, there are four key tenets organizations can follow to reinvigorate their digital transformation journeys while creating more business value with fewer resources:
- Make developers more productive -- improve developer experience so that they can recruit and retain tech talent and make developers more productive so they ship better software faster.
- Measure productivity and efficiency -- better measure impact across the software delivery lifecycle so they can improve operational efficiency.
- Secure the software supply chain -- reducing security and compliance risk.
- Accelerate cloud migration -- secure their cloud migration with the right controls in place to minimize risk.
With these core improvements in place, the next step to becoming a high-performing software factory is measurement, which means inspecting our value streams. This starts with using the three pillars of empirical process control: transparency, inspection, and adaptation -- and identifying the types of metrics to be measured.
Types of Value Stream Metrics
There are two types of metrics in value stream management: flow and realization.
Value Flow metrics define how we deliver software, from ideation through to realization. Included within flow metrics are DORA metrics, including deployment frequency, lead time for change, time to restore service, and change failure rate. DORA metrics provide a quantitative measure of performance.
These metrics, when analyzed in combination with metrics such as issue resolution lead time, cycle time, new issues, and deploys, offer a holistic view of the value stream's efficiency. Using these measures wisely and in combination is important to identify the true problems that exist in value stream delivery.
Value Realization metrics are measures of what has been delivered. These include measures such as revenue, sales, and profit margin. However, not all value realization measures are based on currency. Net promoter scores and customer journey time can be equally important value realization indicators.
These lagging metrics are measures of how a company has performed in the past. However, leading metrics such as visitors, reviews, and conversion rates can provide a better indication of future performance.
How and When to Inspect Value Streams
The Value Stream Management Consortium produced a roadmap that provides a starting point for this discussion. The implementation roadmap consists of nine stages: Go > Assess > Vision > Identify > Organize > Map > Connect > Inspect > Adapt.
You'll note that at the start of the roadmap is the definition of the vision. This is an important first step for inspections as it frames the parameters for inspection. For example, if the vision of the organization is to be the first to market with new products, then speed of delivery is an important factor. However, if customer satisfaction and service reliability are the most important elements, then quality metrics will be top of the list. It's key that the vision or the value statement that's made during the vision is driven by the business outcomes that you are targeting.
Now, there's an important part in the implementation roadmap, and that is in the order of three key elements.
The Identify and Organize stages are about the people. Mapping is about bringing together the correct people with a lean and efficient process. Connect is then about enabling technology that automates the lean process and simplifies operations for the people, reducing cognitive load, improving quality and security and enabling faster delivery of value. With the people, process and technology in place to support the vision, we can then apply inspection and adaptation to our value streams for optimization, continuously and in real time.
This roadmap ensures that individuals are not only connected to the technology but are also equipped to utilize it effectively. The human aspect in the "Identify and Organize" phase should be visually represented in a value stream reference architecture. Subsequently, a value stream discovery plays a crucial role in mapping these individuals and teams into a workflow strategically designed to enhance both the developer and user experience. And then finally, enabling that developer experience with the DevOps toolchain connected through a DevSecOps platform.
A Platform Approach
Providing a platform approach can bring together the entire software development lifecycle into a single application. A platform approach enables a value stream-driven mindset, shortening the time from idea to customer value and establishing a powerful flywheel for data collection and aggregation. The benefit of a value stream platform approach is visibility across personas and products. So that companies can measure improvement and cycle times, and the platform approach unifies the entire experience so that companies can be faster than their competition.
In moving from idea to customer value, Gartner has a study called Market Guide for DevOps Value Stream Delivery Platforms, which highlights that value stream delivery platforms provide fully integrated capabilities that enable continuous delivery of software. These capabilities may include planning, version control, continuous integration, test automation, release orchestration, continuous deployment and rollback monitoring, security testing, and analyzing value stream metrics. Value stream delivery platforms integrate with infrastructure and compliance automation tools to automate infrastructure deployment and policy enforcement.
The Value Stream Discovery
Metrics and inspection come together with the Value Stream Discovery, which looks at a company’s current and desired future state as it relates to their technology value stream -- the amount of time and resources it takes to move from idea and requirements to deployment and customer value. The assessment also establishes a baseline to measure software delivery performance progress and identify the touch points in the process that do not add value to the customer or the business. Using the outputs from a value stream discovery means we can more easily configure a lean setup for a DevOps toolchain.
The imperative lies in adopting a unified platform geared towards achieving our envisioned future state that caters to the needs of user and developer experiences, as well as customer outcomes. This approach not only fosters transparency essential for effective inspections but also underscores the significance of applying metrics in assessing and understanding the current state. The value stream discovery emerges as a pivotal tool, allowing for the comprehensive mapping of processes, personas, tools, interactions, and measurements into a singular view.
Software Defines the Pace of Innovation
As we look at the rationale behind inspecting value streams, it becomes clear that visibility is key to understanding how we deliver and what we deliver. In a rapidly evolving digital landscape, where software defines the pace of innovation, businesses must excel in developing, securing, and deploying software.
Image Credit: Sergey Nivens / Shutterstock
Stephen Walters is Field CTO for GitLab. Stephen has been in the IT industry for over 30 years. He is an extensively experienced Subject Matter Expert in Value Stream Management, DevSecOps, DevOps, ALM, SDLC and IT4IT, with management & consultancy experience across end-to-end IT disciplines. Currently also operating as an Ambassador for the DevOps Institute and an Influencer in the Value Stream Management Consortium, he is interested in all things DevOps. Connect with him on LinkedIn.