First week reflections

So having joined Eficode , I'm now 1 week back in the GitLab ecosystem and it's lovely to be back. Last Wednesday I already got up to London to meet with Steve Challis and Adam Woolford (thank you both for joining!) at an Eficode & GitLab lunch and learn at the Gherkin, in the heart of London's insurance district.

Marc Dillon was (an excellent!) facilitator for a working lunch, constructing a combined value stream from audience contributions. The discussion in the room was reconfirmation that: 1) Value stream thinking can be extremely valuable; 2) In theory, it can apply to almost everything; 3) The Devil really is in the detail; 4) It is an extremely valuable tool for looking at organisation efficiency. But in terms of limitations, to really understand that in depth, you need to understand the wider factors impacting the organisation: market forces; resourcing; strategic goals; education and awareness.

Perhaps one of the more interesting comments from the audience: how do I internally sell benefits of value stream exercises internally? Especially upward to more senior stakeholders who may not be as au fait? This is consistent with conversations I had 5 years ago now with different customers when we started to introduce the value stream analytics functionalities at GitLab. My over simplification of this that it is a translation challenge. How do I translate the work efforts of my development teams into business value, such that the C-suite understand some of the key metrics we are measuring?

Marc Dillon's answer to this on the day: find out how it aligns to that leader's compensation. For sure: find out how it will personally impact someone and you shortcut the conversation efficiently.

For me though there is an education and awareness question as well. As we saw in the past 15 months of ChatGPT fuelled C-suite skilling up on all things AI, it is possible for this to happen. Perhaps the answers are more simple: make sure that the software delivery process is understood at the highest levels of the company. After all, if every company is now a software company, then surely it is incumbent on teams running companies to commit to understanding how that type of value is shipped.

To that end, value streams are the perfect tool to introduce key mental models for understanding the software org. One question in the room was how to get started with VSM/VSA. I think I would say: just do it. Start something internally for a selected value stream and see how you get on. However, there needs to be some sense of objectivity to collecting the data. Such that: 1) a third party is probably going to be able to give a more accurate view of the organisation, than someone that is part of the value stream itself; 2) quantifiable metric gathering, on an ongoing basis, to fit the value streams created in #1.

Obviously consultants like Eficode can help kick things off with #1, but the ongoing value streams practise can be incredibly assisted by having a way to self-serve insights over time. That relies on data. And that data will need to be (a) readily accessible/available; (b) comparable; and (c) consistent.

The (a), (b), and (c) above are perhaps the hardest challenges for most organisations to be able to produce an ongoing, measure and populated value stream of their software development processes. This is compounded when there are a plethora of tools and platforms that different teams use, each with their own unique data types.

GitLab of course takes a different approach, as the all-in-one DevSecOps platform. Because it is a single application, there is a single flow of information and a dissolution of silo's. That inherently gives you insights into your data which may not be either easy or possible with disparate toolchains.

That's enough Monday morning posting!

If you would like to have a chat with us about how Eficode can help with your value stream journey, just message me here on LinkedIn or get in touch at [email protected]

To keep track of what the GitLab team are working on regarding VSM, follow: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/plan/value_stream_management/.