Value stream management is a management technique or practice that aims to increase the value stream of a business from the customer’s request to delivery to the customer in the shortest possible time. A systematic approach to measuring and improving flow helps organizations provide full transparency in the end-to-end software lifecycle to better understand the value they bring, identify waste, and improve process efficiency to optimize value flow for customers.
What is Value Stream Management?
Value stream management software helps teams document, analyze, and manage the measurable value of DevOps projects and processes. These tools provide companies with a comprehensive top-down understanding of the factors that contribute to the measurable value of their projects and processes. DevOps teams use value stream management software to verify that product or service development meets company standards to maximize return on investment.
Intro at a Glance
- It allows you to align digital initiatives with the desired business results.
- Improves software delivery speed.
- Provides endpoint visibility on SDLC.
- It captures data and tracks it with KPIs that determine speed and quality.
- It helps identify waste of equipment, people, and processes
- Using Agile and DevOps methodologies and efficient software delivery ecosystem is created
- Provides traceability and predictability.
Definition: Value Stream Management is a management approach that focuses on the flow of customers between endpoints, their challenges, and ideas (as input) to target business value (as output) through the elimination of best practices and wasted time and resources. In short, VSM encourages companies to be more competitive in their markets and improve their business performance.
Why is Value Stream Management important?
Today, almost every enterprise is a software company, whether it’s online banking, order fulfillment, travel apps, or whatever you have. Businesses feel pressure from both customers and competitors, leading to an increase in the volume and speed of product requests.
As a result, issues arise that undermine the timing of the valuation. This causes a lot of headaches for an organization as a whole, especially for product teams and their leaders, who are under pressure to deliver faster and more often. VSM embracing relieves pressure, minimizes errors, and allows product groups to deliver value faster.
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Value Stream Management identifies wastes
Value Stream Management is a powerful visual design tool that depicts both the current state (which is happening now) and the future state (ideal workflow) that takes an item from start to finish. It is important to note that the value flow map helps identify wastes that occur in an entire process from the supplier to the customer, or from an uninitiated state to completion. Waste is usually any operation or step in a series of value streams that do not add value to the customer. Essentially, waste is any process in the value stream for which the customer does not want to pay. By graphically representing the value stream or all the activities required to create a product or task, you can better identify which activities do not add value.
Value Stream Management makes processes efficient
It’s not just a color chart, it’s a value-flow map that labels and connects material and information flows. In this way, the value flow map determines the acceptance time, lead time, and cycle time between each point in the process. This activity allows the company to see where the actual value is added to the process or not, which allows them to improve the overall efficiency of delivering the end product to achieve maximum performance and achieve the desired goals. Value Stream Management strives for an efficient and quality-focused system that uses resources exactly as needed and produces products and/or services that achieve optimum results.
Value Stream Management aligns cross-functional teams for greater buy-in
Value stream management involves all interdepartmental stakeholders involved in the various stages of the process. The surprising benefit that people don’t easily associate with Value Stream Mapping is that the practice of mapping current and future states aligns the entire company or department phase with common goals. The greatest results are achieved when a cross-functional team is assembled, or at least an acquisition is made from top management through middle management to operational, administrative, sales, and logistics teams.
As a result, stakeholders are able to view the process from the department or their workplace responsibilities at the corporate level through a tunnel vision perspective. Thus, creating a shared understanding of the current situation places the emphasis and priority on developing the basic process that generates income so that it can be placed in the ideal workflow in the future.
Value Stream Management provides a center point for conversation on future growth
Once the value stream map is completed and stakeholders are coordinated, the map is able to have a greater conversation about the company’s vision and set common goals for growth. Increased efficiency and cost savings through waste elimination or a better understanding of the process will facilitate these discussions and develop plans that take a big step forward toward an ideal future state.
Why Value Stream Management is necessary
Understanding the workflow in the value stream from idea to software installation is essential and ensuring that feedback loops are created until the customer or user recognizes the business value. In the process, we are expected to see limitations, bottlenecks, capacity concerns, negative emotions affecting redundancy, behavior, and performance, or any other waste that could stop the business from achieving the company’s goals. By understanding the flow between endpoints (value and time), using best practices and empirical research, we can measure, strategy, and continually improve based on target business results. These things are not easy to accomplish and require the right people and a higher level of commitment to innovation.
All businesses need to focus on enabling business responsiveness and success by reducing lead times from ideas to software delivery. Each strategy should have an implementation plan and metrics to achieve goals from the organizational level to the team level. The step of accountability is also part of the discipline.
Every day, business competition is growing and meeting customer expectations so the development teams need to work faster and more efficiently than ever before. Value Stream Management empowers teams to continually improve their software delivery activities to create even more value for their customers. This includes improving product quality and gradually improving processes. Through value flow management, organizations can achieve the desired Agile + DevOps performance.