Value Stream Management

Accelerating Your Organization’s Time to Value with Value Stream Management???

Part 1

Much of the focus over the past decade and a half has been on the implementation of Lean-Agile Ways of Working (WoW) within organizations. The intent and hope of these efforts is that by adopting these new ways of working that organizations would realize the benefits of improved value delivery resulting in better products and services that delight customers, engage employees and, ideally, increase profits.??

Digital. ai's annual State of Agile report does an excellent job of capturing the current state of Agile and future trends. We will reference The 17th State of Agile Report a few more times in this post and I encourage you to review it in its entirety. The screenshot below lists the top reasons organizations choose to adopt Agile from page 12 of the report. See Figure 1. You can see that the top two reasons are tied at 41%:?

• 41% - Prioritize, deliver, and measure incremental customer and business value?

• 41% - Accelerate time to Market?

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Let us zoom in on the issue of organizations unhappy with Agile adoption rates (pg. 16 of the report). See Figure 2 below.?

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The report states that the top 3 reasons organizations are not satisfied with their adoption of Agile practices are:?

• 46% - Company still has many legacy systems requiring mixed approach?

• 37% - Siloed teams causing delays on deliverables?

• 34% - Clashes with company culture?

Adopting Value Stream Management within your organization could help address the first two items on this list by highlighting and addressing the delays that legacy systems and siloed teams cause within a system.??

Let us first start by defining what Value Stream Management is so that we understand the value it can provide an organization regardless of what flavor of Agile they organization has adopted.?

Below is definition that FlowBuddy, an AI agent available on the Value Stream Management Consortium’s site) provided me:??

“Value Stream Management (VSM) is a way of working that encompasses a number of practices and techniques to organize, map, measure, manage, improve, govern, and accelerate the flow of measurable valuable outcomes to the customer. It makes work visible and surfaces insights into where delays, waste, and non-value-adding work can be removed to improve customer experience. VSM starts with identifying the value streams, the people involved, and the steps in each value stream. “?

FlowBuddy goes on to state …?

“It recognizes that most organizations will have many interconnected value streams with dependencies on one another. VSM is supported by technology in the form of Value Stream Management Platforms (VSMPs), which simplify building and managing CICD pipelines and DevOps toolchains, thus maximizing value by providing visibility, traceability, and observability into the flow of work.”?

Value Stream Management is different but related to Value Stream Mapping. Let us look at the differences between the two.?

Value Stream Mapping (VSM)?focuses on visualizing and documenting all the steps involved in delivering value to the customer, highlighting areas for improvement. It is primarily a tool for understanding and documenting processes.?

Value Stream Management (VSM), on the other hand, is a broader practice that aims to optimize the entire flow of value through an organization. It involves managing, measuring, and improving processes using technology and data-driven insights to continuously enhance value delivery.?

While Value Stream Mapping is a crucial part of Value Stream Management, the latter includes additional practices and tools for ongoing improvement and optimization.?

In Frameworx’s previous 4-part blog series, we focused on the 4-step approach that SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) recommends in mapping a Value Stream. They are:?

• Unclogging Delays to Accelerate Flow in any System - Part 1?

• Unclogging Delays to Accelerate Flow in any System - Part 2?

• Unclogging Delays to Accelerate Flow?in any System? - Part 3?

• Unclogging Delays to Accelerate Flow?in any System?- Part 4?

In this blog series, we are going to explore the Value Stream Consortium’s implementation roadmap (see Figure 3) to understand why Value Stream Management is an essential tool to add to your organization’s continuous improvement toolkit and to show you how to implement it.?

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Stay tuned for our next installment in this series and learn more about the Value Stream Management Consortium.??

• Value Stream Management Consortium (vsmconsortium.org)?

• VSM Taxonomy (vsmconsortium.org)?

• Introduction to Value Stream Management Course (vsmconsortium.org)?