Value Stream Management?

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

Part 5??

In part 4 of this series on Value Stream Management (VSMgmt.) we discussed steps 5 through 6 in the Implementation Roadmap from the VSM Consortium: Organize and Map.

In this post we will explore steps 7 through 9 in the Implementation Roadmap: Connect, Inspect and Adapt.

Connect

The Connect step in the Value Stream Management Implementation Roadmap highlights the importance of linking the DevOps toolchain to trace ideas from inception to value outcomes, measured by customer experience. This step helps teams visualize the entire value stream, making delays, rework, and waste visible. By integrating tools and data, organizations can gain insights for improvements and make informed decisions based on feedback. This connection is essential for continuous inspection and adaptation in digital value streams, enhancing overall efficiency and effectiveness in delivering value to customers.

Here’s a brief overview of the connect activities from the book The Lean-Agile Way*:

• Define communication protocols: Establish clear guidelines for how team members exchange information, ensuring consistent and effective communication across all value stream levels.
• Integrate technology and tools: Combine various technology solutions and tools into a cohesive system that supports the value stream, enhancing the team’s ability to work cohesively and efficiently.
• Automate data collection: Reduce manual effort, minimize errors, and provide a consistent and reliable data flow for analysis and decision-making.
• Enable real-time visibility: Set up systems that provide immediate insight into the value stream’s performance, allowing for prompt identification of issues and opportunities for improvement.
• Establish feedback loops: Create feedback loops to support continuous learning and improvement, enabling the value stream to adapt and evolve based on insights gathered from the team’s experiences and collected data.

The image below (see Figure 2) is from the VSM website showing an array of tools when integrated create the necessary visibility to manage, inspect and adapt your value stream network.

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Tools like Planview and others have modules focused on managing your organization’s value stream network. A tool that I have been learning more about is Allstacks. The Allstacks platform provides an affordable and powerful alternative to other integration and dashboarding tools by offering the following capabilities:

• Software Delivery: simplifies tracking software deliverables by offering a comprehensive, customized view across your organization.
• Software Operations: It provides a holistic view of the development life cycle, enabling data-driven decisions and performance improvements.
• R&D Capitalization: It automates the R&D cost capitalization process with consistent, defensible reports from multiple data sources.
• Security: The platform proactively enhances security practices to ensure the safety of your sensitive business data.

Inspect

The Inspect step in the Value Stream Management Implementation Roadmap involves continuously examining the value stream to find improvement areas. This includes gathering insights from products, processes, and team practices. Teams are encouraged to share their work openly and seek feedback, especially at the end of each sprint, to adapt to changing customer needs. The goal is to foster a culture of continuous improvement by regularly assessing whether the team is better off than before. This step highlights the importance of using data and metrics to guide inspections, ensuring that changes enhance customer satisfaction and overall value delivery.

The ‘inspect’ phase focuses on analyzing and improving the performance of value streams through strategic actions. Key activities in this phase from the book The Lean-Agile Way include:

• Define relevant metrics: Identify essential performance indicators like lead time, cycle time, throughput, ongoing work, and defect rates.
• Leverage automated data collection: Use real-time data from DevOps tools to analyze performance and understand the true progress of work. For instance, while developers may mark work as ‘Done’ in a Kanban system, the completed work might remain in another team’s release queue for months. DevOps tools provide a more accurate view by basing metrics on the end-to-end process.
• Monitor performance: Continuously monitor your value stream’s performance using real-time data and insights from DevOps tools to prevent service disruptions. Teams should keep an eye on system attributes such as security, reliability, performance, and scalability.
• Analyze the data: Assess the collected data to evaluate process effectiveness and identify areas for improvement, including business outcomes for products and services.
• Set experimental improvement goals: Develop specific goals for experimental improvements to enhance your value stream performance, guided by detailed data analysis.

Lean and Agile ways of working provide the necessary feedback loops for continuous improvement. By connecting our tools and teams, we can use quantitative data to identify improvement opportunities, such as bottlenecks in the value stream or quality issues in our product. At the team level, the Iteration Retrospective helps identify opportunities for improvement. At the Agile Release Train level, the Inspect & Adapt event uses quantitative data from integrated tools to inform the Quantitative and Qualitative Measurement portion, addressing systemic improvement opportunities.

Adapt

The Adapt step in the Value Stream Management Implementation Roadmap highlights the need for continuous improvement using insights from the Inspect step. During this phase, organizations evaluate their progress and effectiveness over time. The focus is on adjusting processes and practices based on feedback and inspection results. Teams are encouraged to regularly assess their performance and determine if they are improving. The goal of the Adapt step is to enhance value delivery by promoting faster learning, increasing return on investment, reducing costs, and improving satisfaction for both customers and employees. This ongoing adaptation is essential for staying aligned with organizational goals and customer needs.

This phase involves seven key actions to evolve and refine the value stream outlined in the book The Lean-Agile Way:

• Embrace continuous improvement: Commit to ongoing enhancement, always seeking ways to improve the value stream.
• Eliminate waste: Identify and remove inefficiencies to streamline processes and maximize value.
• Measure results and iterate: Evaluate the outcomes of changes and make iterative adjustments to ensure continuous progress.
• Fine-tune processes: Adjust and optimize existing procedures for greater effectiveness and efficiency.
• Automate workflows: Implement automation to reduce manual effort and increase consistency and speed.
• Share good practices: Cultivate and apply successful patterns and techniques across the enterprise’s value streams.
• Foster a culture of adaptation: Nurture an environment where flexibility and change are encouraged.

In Conclusion

Thank you for following this blog series on Value Stream Management. I encourage you to learn more about this topic since it is an essential tool in optimizing value delivery within any organization by improving visibility, flow, quality and customer value.

Below are some recommended VSMgmt. reference materials:

• Value Stream Consortium
• Flow Engineering
• The Lean-Agile Way

Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions related to VSMgmt. or need assistance implementing it. If you are attending the SAFe Summit 2024 in Washington, D.C. please stop the Frameworx booth to talk with Richard Knaster, one of the authors of The Lean-Agile Way or visit the Frameworx Consulting site to learn more about our services.

Thank you!

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*Rupp, Cecil 'Gary'; Knaster, Richard; Pereira, Steve; Shalloway, Al. The Lean-Agile Way: Unleash business results in the digital era with value stream management. Packt Publishing. Kindle Edition.