New Forrester Study Commissioned by CollabNet VersionOne Sheds Light on How Enterprises View VSM

Continuous delivery and speed are important for software, but they waste resources and impact the brand if the resulting software isn’t delivering great customer outcomes. It is our experience that VSM prevents that problem very well while delivering other benefits. But our organization wanted a deeper understanding of where enterprises stand in their acceptance and understanding of VSM. So, about six months ago we commissioned Forrester Consulting to undertake an academic study about the market’s perception of VSM and how VSM makes software development and delivery processes in the context of Agile-DevOps more effective, and to make recommendations based on their findings. Forrester recently concluded the research and documented it in a paper titled Holistic Solutions Drive the ‘Value’ in Value Stream Management, which includes survey findings on the challenges, results, and learnings of IT and Business Professionals involved in executing VSM initiatives. To provide a sense of how extensive the study is, Forrester conducted a survey of 305 IT and business professionals across a range of industries in North America and Europe. You can read the original paper or check out the eBook summarizing the key insights and statistics from Forrester’s research on VSM enterprise adoption.

The study offers details on several key findings. Organizations understand the importance of optimizing software delivery. But they still face challenges in everything from poorly integrated toolchains and misaligned organizations to lack of visibility into business objectives. Most organizations see how VSM can help, and early VSM adopters are seeing some success aligning software efforts to their business strategies, but they too still need better integrated tools and organizational alignment to support VSM and gain the full benefits and business value. Nevertheless, VSM is gaining traction.

More over, today VSM is a crucial part of the mindshift in the software development community towards understanding business outcomes, as opposed to output metrics alone. Output and speed alone can’t guarantee customer satisfaction. Forrester found that only 25% of software development teams currently use business value metrics like feature usage to measure success, and different teams often use different metrics. But they are looking for ways to improve that by applying VSM and thinking more about how software ties to overall organizational success.

The study also offers four major recommendations for those interested in practicing VSM to help their organizations focus on value instead of just continuous software delivery. The recommendations provide guidance on how to start or grow your VSM practice; how output metrics can be used to help drive further automation; how to use outcome metrics to measure business value; and, how to seek a complete VSM solution.

All of those findings and recommendations are discussed in deep detail in the study.  Also, in the eBook based on the study we explore key insights and statistics from Forrester’s research of VSM enterprise adoption to provide:

• Inspiration from the software success of early VSM adopters
• Clearly describe software capabilities that are important to value delivery
• Show how to navigate common challenges that disrupt the flow of value
• Determine the right VSM solution
• Provide valuable tips and best practices for adopting a VSM practice

For many years CollabNet has been an early thought leader and industry voice for Value Stream Management (VSM), advocating that VSM tools and practices are essential for aligning Agile and DevOps with the business in order to deliver customer results. That’s because VSM provides complete visibility into the flow of value across the entire software delivery lifecycle and connected toolchain. You can identify bottlenecks, minimize waste, and uncover areas for improvement to optimize your value stream. The study shows us that customers want and need the type of optimization that VSM delivers. It also shows that most companies have quite a way to go with adopting VSM and are thinking about it. Once they do adopt it, they’ll gain the benefits of software development efforts that stay consistently aligned to customer experience and organizational strategy.

We hope this study helps you assess your own organization’s readiness to start applying VSM. A special thanks goes out to Sophia Christakis, Project Director Forrester and her entire team, Diego Lo Giudice, VP, Principal Analyst Forrester, and Christopher Condo, Principal Analyst Forrester.