Value Stream Management Platform From Kovair

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By Akshay Sharma – CTO, Kovair Software, Inc. & Amit Dasgupta, Director Major Accounts & Partnerships, Kovair Software Inc.

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Introduction to Value Stream Management

Software delivery with agility has not only increased the complexity of projects but at the same time has increased risks of failures for organizations across industries, no matter their product or service. Too often, in many organizations, there is a lack of alignment of goals between business objectives within IT work, such as the pursuit of higher productivity in software delivery, with increased needs for newer features/functions/services, higher quality, but at lower costs, leads to well-intentioned initiatives that ultimately fall short of their goals. With the correct alignment of goals using Value Stream Management – VSM, and corresponding tools/platforms, organizations that are successfully aligning software development and delivery with their business objectives can efficiently scale their Agile and DevOps transformations more effectively. This emerging trend, referred to as Value Stream Management is allowing organizations to focus on work that delivers value to the customer and the business.

Benefits of Value Stream Management – VSM applies to all stakeholders across the enterprise — from portfolio managers, to program managers, release managers and team members. It provides a holistic approach to application development and delivery by applying the principles of DevOps leveraging any development methodology, preferably Agile. Some of the major benefits of Value Stream Management for different stakeholders are:

Increased management visibility on areas of Program & Project Health & Resource Utilization
Better alignment of project delivery teams with business strategy
Real-time visibility of ROI for C-Level executives
Identification, improvement and standardization of working processes
Compatible data and measurements across tools
Increased collaboration and knowledge sharing
Decreased deployment delays, inefficiencies and errors

According to Gartner’s report entitled: “The Future of DevOps Toolchains Will Involve Maximizing Flow in IT Value Streams”:

“DevOps value stream delivery and management platforms provide unique visibility and traceability into workflows throughout the DevOps value stream, because they plug into planning, development and operational tools. The platforms provide visualization tools to analyze customer-focused metrics, such as lead time, deployment frequency, defect escape rate, feature adoption and time to respond to failures. The visualization of how workflows through the plan, build, test, preproduction, release, configure and operate phases constitutes a value stream map.” – source Gartner.

Need for Value Stream Management Platform

True benefits of Value Stream Management – VSM cannot be realized with the help of one single tool or just a tool orchestrator. It calls for a platform that should enable organizations to identify the value being delivered to the customer by providing a holistic view of entire Delivery Lifecycle Management with Process Compliance dashboards. For successful delivery of value to customers, organizations need more visibility and control beyond the flow metrics which gives an idea of what is getting delivered, in what velocity. Some important aspects which contribute to project success which should be monitored and controlled at every level, beyond flow metrics include:

Real-time metrics for
- Proper utilization of resources
- ROI calculation
- Resource efficiency
Seamless collaboration between multiple processes, teams, and tools
Proper automated workflow-based governance across SDLC processes
Synchronization of tools over any infrastructure platform like on-premise, public/private cloud, Kubernetes.

Kovair-The True Value Stream Management Platform

Kovair with its suite of products offers a complete Value Stream Management Platform – VSMP.

Source: Kovair

Kovair’s VSMP Toolchain addresses the need for unified visibility, orchestration, integration, governance and management of the ALM and DevOps value stream to improve flow and traceability, with process compliance, and end-to-end product lifecycle management.

Kovair DevOps

Kovair DevOps fills in one major piece of the VSMP offering, uniquely from Kovair. Kovair DevOps with its capabilities not only bridges the gap between Operations and Internal engineering teams but also automates the entire process from code check-in to deployment through a concurrent task-based CI/CD pipeline. It provides a real-time insight to improve delivery velocity, helps identify and eliminate bottlenecks, and delivers with lower deployment costs. It enables DevOps over a Concurrent Multimodal Development Environment with the choice of their best of breed tools, with legacy ALM and newer Agile and DevOps supported, using best-of-breed tools. The unique capability of Kovair DevOps also allows organizations to:

View the status of the pipelines or invoke, pause, and stop them from e-mails, and if needed allow for it all to be done remotely with WFH (work-from-home) team members.
Invoke custom routines and Microservices to be a part of the delivery process.
Enforce Process Adherence to the process such as proper DevSecOps security testing.
Ensure role-based controls are adhered to, such as release management with proper sign-offs.

Source: Kovair

Kovair Omnibus

Kovair’s Gartner Cool Vendor award-winning proprietary ESB, Kovair Omnibus which is also recently launched as Kovair Enterprise iPaaS offers a platform-centric approach to connecting both ALM and DevOps toolchains across heterogenous environments that support end-to-end capabilities for continuous delivery. Kovair Omnibus not only offers integrations with more than 110+ multifunction, multivendor as well as open source tools covering all phases of ALM, PPM, PLM, ERP, CRM and ITSM functions but in addition Kovair has proven experience on integrating with custom in-house tools of organizations. Some of the key benefits of Kovair Omnibus include the following:

Provides synchronization of data between tools over heterogenous and hybrid cloud environment
Facilitates connections to any existing tools and applications of the organization and make them part of the integrated tools ecosystem by protecting the investment of the organization
Offers codeless mouse click configurability and allows organizations to save significant setup time through mouse click based reusable configuration of integrations
Integrates Attachments, Comments, Rich Text & Relationships associated with records
Establishes integrations over secured channels to eliminate any security risk during transportation of data
Allows for hybrid multi-cloud solutions, with secure, DRaaS (disaster recovery as a service).

Source: Kovair

Kovair ALM

Kovair ALM comes with a centralized Web based platform for stakeholders to collaborate, manage, and track the progress of a release across all phases of Application Lifecycle Management – ALM. Process Compliance solutions offered out of Kovair ALM leverages it’s concurrent task-based workflow engine which helps automate all the phases of reviewing and monitoring risks on a regular basis and then continuously updates the risk plans, which can be part of the ISO 27005 Security Risk Management Process, ISO 26262 compliance to automotive standards, and other workflow standards such as standards for medical IoT compliance. Kovair’s graphical editor-based mouse click configurable task-based workflow engine enables organizations to implement central governance cutting across different phases of ALM.

Source: Kovair

Kovair PPM

Kovair PPM is a one stop solution that provides a unified platform to manage budgets, schedules, resources, and field data through a single interface. Kovair PPM delivers greater value to the organization by connecting the entire lifecycle from planning to execution. It enables IT leaders to optimize their project portfolios, manage the capacity of resources against the demands raised from different projects, and connects plans and resources to the actual project execution. Using Kovair PPM, organizations can define strategic initiatives for portfolio to projects to their outcomes. It allows leaders to define strategic initiatives, choose the relevant projects for execution, provide deeper insights into development phases, projects and programs by generating EVMs (Earned Value Management — EVM metrices), at all levels, providing valuable inputs to the management, enabling them in making data-oriented decisions, for better Time and Cost Management of a project. Kovair PPM not only provides a complete visibility across the entire value stream but also provides a complete visibility of the delivery lifecycle from triple constraint perspectives (Resource, Time & Cost) to the C-Level executives as well as to the stakeholders of projects through role-based real-time reports & dashboards.

Source: Kovair

Key Capabilities of Kovair’s Value Stream Management Platform- KVSMP

Provides industry-specific, guided templates empowering teams to instantly begin process compliant workflows, within the Value Stream.
Provides integrations with multiple security tools providing visibility to security vulnerabilities, in open source software, as an example, or other risks such as inventory control problems to cloud-based resiliency problems in the field
Gives complete visibility of Risks threats or opportunities through real-time reports & dashboards, including process compliance dashboards, throughout Value Stream
Allows managers to define and maintain instantaneous traceability between Design, Process requirements, Risks and Hazards, to operational metrics from tools like APM (applications performance monitoring), in the field, updated within the Value Stream.
Supports cross-platform installation, complete CI/CD solutions, with containerization supported for microservices, all from remote role-based, process-compliant email controls
Kovair DevOps supports notification on the build status, so every movement is notified to management
Kovair’s project planning solutions include a task scheduler, project calendar, resource availability, GANTT Charts, and workload management. This allows managers to plan and control the application development from the beginning to the end with complete product lifecycle management, within the Value Stream.
It provides complete insight into release progress & process efficiency through real-time reports & dashboards for thorough value stream management analysis.

Key Benefits of Kovair’s Value Stream Management Platform – KVSMP

Kovair’s Value Stream Management Platform – KVSMP, with its tool chain enables organizations with complete visibility across the value stream to ensure customer satisfaction. The several benefits of KVSMP are:

Targeted and systematic waste reduction – Provides unified view to senior management, through middle management to the operations, administration, sales and logistics teams. This enables early detection of bottlenecks and elimination of waste at every step of delivery.
Ensure Process Governance – Offers task-based workflow both at macro and micro levels to ensure governance across and within every team involved in delivery.
Improve cross-functional collaboration – Enables collaboration between tools, processes and teams over hybrid infrastructure environment.
Gain improved productivity – Provides complete visibility with respect to triple constraints of Time, Resource and Cost enabling better productivity through efficient usage of resources.
Increase Process Efficiency – Offers secure and efficient integration seamlessly with best-of-breed applications with Kovair’s award-winning Omnibus multi-cloud iPaaS solution.

Conclusion

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 customer and defining what is of value for them, KVSMP provides a structured visualization of the key steps and corresponding data needed to understand and intelligently make improvements that optimize the entire process, not just one section at the expense of another. To know more about Kovair products visit www.kovair.com

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Value Stream Management Platform From Kovair