Defining Value Stream Management for Business Leaders

I recently published an article on Forbes, defining Value Stream Management (VSM) for executives and business leaders. The software industry has been talking about applying Value Stream Management to improve transparency, efficiency and quality for a few years now. Yet, you won’t find many clear and concise definitions of what it is or how to “do” it.

In the article, I’ve defined Value Stream Management this way:

“Value Stream Management offers a unique view of the software delivery lifecycle through the customer experience lens, to better align with business objectives and scale Agile and DevOps transformations.”

Value Stream Management, above all, is a way of thinking. It’s a fundamental shift in an organization’s mindset and how software is viewed. Software products are integral to the success and strategy of almost any business today. Identifying and managing the value these assets bring to the company is what Value Stream Management is all about.

In my article, I talk about how CEOs and board-level executives are taking an active interest in Value Stream Management and want visibility into software development and delivery:

“Business stakes are sky high, and executive leadership is looking to software to ensure value is delivered to the bottom-line, as well as derived from the development process. They need good ways to do this because software is constantly changing, but the process to adopt new IT strategies across the enterprise requires more time and focus.

That’s why executives need to champion practices that align development and IT so that innovative ideas can be executed smoothly through software while delivering value.”

By changing the mindsets of — not only IT practitioners, developers and technical leaders — but C-level executives, to see the linkages between software development and customer experience or business value, VSM becomes achievable. There are a number of tools and platforms out there that can help make it easier to capture the complete picture of existing value flow and allow for changes to be made, based on business priorities. CollabNet VersionOne, recognized by Forrester for its solution for VSM, provides these capabilities and more as one of the only end-to-end Agile plus DevOps platform for VSM.

I invite you to read the full article on Forbes, and learn more about our solutions for Value Stream Management by checking out the resources below.

To Dive Deeper into Value Stream Management:

• Here’s an Enterprise Value Stream Management overview.
• Read more about our VS solution.
• Check out Forrester’s New Wave on Value Stream Management Tools made available for download by CollabNet VersionOne.  

Value Stream Mapping and Management is at the heart of how we approach DevOps.

At CollabNet VersionOne we started putting the pieces together nearly five years ago and were the first company to really build VSM for DevOps.  

We realized early what the power of measurement and metrics throughout the software development lifecycle, combined with visibility could do for organizations and DevOps teams themselves. Though our solutions have always enabled some level of Value Stream Management for the enterprise — due to visibility and traceability — we have dramatically increased how much we tap into the power of using measurement and KPIs to map value streams. 

I invite everyone interested in raising their DevOps methodology to the next level, to consider VSM.