{"id":42592,"date":"2021-01-06T09:15:48","date_gmt":"2021-01-06T14:15:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sdtimes.com\/?p=42592"},"modified":"2021-03-09T07:42:39","modified_gmt":"2021-03-09T12:42:39","slug":"value-stream-management-will-be-a-driving-force-behind-successful-businesses-in-2021","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sdtimes.com\/value-stream\/value-stream-management-will-be-a-driving-force-behind-successful-businesses-in-2021\/","title":{"rendered":"Value stream management will be a driving force behind successful businesses in 2021"},"content":{"rendered":"

If 2020 taught businesses anything, it is that they need to be able to adapt at any moment if they want to stay competitive and be successful. But in order to do that, they need actionable insight into what is going on throughout the entire organization and how that is translating into business value.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mik Kersten, CEO and founder <\/span>Tasktop<\/span><\/a>, says too often when a business takes on a new transformation or reorganization initiative, they end up cutting the wrong people, the wrong services, and making easily avoidable mistakes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHaving a business visible representation of where the value is for the customer, and using that to guide both how you rebalance and how you invest into all of your activities is key,\u201d he explained.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

RELATED CONTENT: <\/strong>
\nA guide to value stream management solutions<\/a><\/strong>
\nWhat do you need to be successful at value stream management, and how can you help?<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

That visible representation is now known as value stream management<\/a> (VSM). It maps people, process, technology and business value to eliminate waste and improve. It\u2019s a new methodology that has rapidly been making a name for itself in the software development industry, and that businesses can no longer afford to put off, according to Bob Davis, chief marketing officer for <\/span>Plutora<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cA year ago maybe the question was: is this a good idea? Is this something that I should prioritize? Now, people have to get that if they are going to be successful and competitive in software in their business, they are going to have to get good at software development. In order for them to get good at software development, they are going to have to transform. In order to transform, they are going to have to have visibility. In order to have visibility, they have to have value stream management,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Bryant Schuck, lead product manager for<\/span> HCL Accelerate<\/span><\/a>, a VSM platform, explained businesses might already be doing some form of VSM without even knowing it, but 2021 will be the year businesses start taking VSM seriously.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of companies are realizing, especially with how 2020 went, that we need to start looking at our processes,\u201d said Schuck. \u201cThe end-to-end picture that VSM can provide is getting much wider. Companies are starting to realize there are bottlenecks outside of development, and are using value stream management beyond the scope of IT or software. It\u2019s an end-to-end methodology that analyzes each facet of the business.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Where VSM can help your business in 2021<\/b>
\nCOVID response. <\/b>As the pandemic continues, organizations are going to need to constantly rebalance and reshift their IT portfolios and reduce or increase budgets to keep up with the changing economy, according to Tasktop\u2019s Kersten. \u201cOrganizations realize that in each of those activities, whether they were actually investing more because the pandemic meant that some of their digital offerings were getting picked up more quickly than before, whether they were rebalancing to adjust with what was happening, or to help their staff whether this is from work from home, or whether they’ve actually cut it, they need a disciplined way, measured way to do it,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Improve Agile<\/a> and DevOps<\/a> initiatives. <\/b>According to Gaurav Rewari, CTO and general manager of AI and VSM at <\/span>Digital.ai<\/span><\/a>, VSM is the next phase in the \u201clogical evolution\u201d of Agile and DevOps. It completes the vision of the methodologies, he explained. \u201cAgile and DevOps are great, and they serve very, very important needs\u2026 but they\u2019re not sufficient,\u201d Rewari said. They serve very specific needs, which was to foster collaboration and be able to have self-organizing, cross-functional teams. But Agile and DevOps are missing the business outcomes and the value piece.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

RELATED CONENT:\u00a0A guide to value stream management solutions<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Value stream management \u201creally allows a mindset change because it\u2019s about being able to prioritize your software investments based on the value being realized. Trying to track the flow of value across the different steps,\u201d Rewari explained. \u201cIt goes from building a product, shipping it, and then having customers adopt it. It suddenly becomes the metric by which decisions are made, and it’s really about aligning the work of technology with the needs of the business.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Better infrastructure. <\/b>According to David Williams, vice president of product strategy at <\/span>Quali<\/span><\/a>, one of the benefits of DevOps is that it always encouraged teams to use whatever technology they needed in order to meet their delivery objectives. However, the problem with giving teams that freedom is that if it\u2019s not maintained or managed properly, it can actually slow the whole process down. There needs to be a way to capture any changes being made so tools and technology don\u2019t bog down the process.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI can’t let 700 teams go out there and just use everything they want and not be accountable to the bottom line. You have to have some controls that have been put in place,\u201d said Williams. \u201cThink about it as you are constantly building Legos. You\u2019re adding more Legos, and you\u2019re only using a subset, but the Legos from the previous build are still there.\u201d What that does, Williams explained, is it causes things to slow down and it takes up infrastructure usage. It needs to be removed so there aren’t any unnecessary pieces in the infrastructure that you weren’t aware of or forgot about.<\/span><\/p>\n

Treating infrastructure as a valuable piece of the life cycle can help businesses optimize spend while managing change and enabling everyone to do their job. \u201cYou want to make sure that as things move through the life cycle of an infrastructure, that when you plan it, when the developers develop it, when the testers test it, the release people release it, whatever the practice is, it\u2019s being maintained and managed in context,\u201d said Williams.<\/span><\/p>\n

The adoption of BizOps. <\/b>In order to help businesses express and implement their goals as well as connect to the development side of things, the BizOps Manifesto was <\/span>released<\/span><\/a> at the end of 2020. It\u2019s a framework that addresses the needs of the business and IT, and helps enterprises work towards common outcomes.\u00a0 Some of the guiding principles include: Business outcomes are the primary measure of success; and business leaders need to make informed technology investment decisions that drive business growth, improve customer experience and increase profitability.<\/span><\/p>\n

According to Tasktop\u2019s Kersten, this idea of BizOps will be closely tied to VSM in 2021.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cFundamentally, what knowledge management is about is making the key metrics, the value streams themselves, visible to the business. BizOps is a way of expressing that,\u201d he said. Those goals of BizOps cannot be possible without value stream management. <\/span>\u201c<\/b>It’s not enough to do Agile and DevOps to do BizOps, you have to be applying the principles and implementing the infrastructure, tooling and visibility that value management provides,\u201d Kersten added.<\/span><\/p>\n

What can you expect to come out of the VSM space in 2021?<\/b>
\nMore education and training. <\/b>Now that organizations are aware of VSM and all the benefits it can bring, it\u2019s time to fill in some of the missing pieces \u2014 mainly education and training, according to Lance Knight, COO for the value stream integration platform <\/span>ConnectALL<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone is saying \u2018I\u2019ve got a tool. I\u2019ve got <\/span>the<\/span><\/i> tool,\u2019 but nobody says I\u2019ve got the tool services to help you be effective at it,\u201d Knight explained. \u201cWe are still trying to figure out what VSM is and how to do it.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Knight looks at 2020 as the year of awareness for value stream management. And now that everyone is realizing they should be doing this, it\u2019s time to think about how to effectively do it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

He explained that there is no \u201cVSM for Dummies\u201d book yet, or really any ways to get certified in this area. As more vendors come out releasing new VSM capabilities, businesses need to be educated on what they want to achieve, and how the tool will help them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYou need someone who is going to educate and help you understand it, without charging a large fee,\u201d said Knight. \u201cValue stream management is human\u2026.we need to help engineers. The humans need to understand the methods and the processes to remove waste. We all have to understand that we have to train and educate and formalize what it means to be a value stream management expert.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s like having a great car in the driveway, but if you don\u2019t have a driver’s license what\u2019s the point? Knight explained. \u201cThat\u2019s where I see value stream management going\u2026 to people getting their VSM driver\u2019s license.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

More AI being applied to the space. <\/b>According to Gartner, predictive analytics are going to be a key capability being offered in value stream management tools as \u201corganizations are increasingly embracing the value of analytics to ensure successful deployments and demonstrate reduced production defects.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Digital.ai is already dedicated to giving its users more AI capabilities in 2021. The company just announced four new patents: automated health assessment and outage prediction; warehouse-based reporting and operational reporting integration; input gathering system and method for defining, refining or validated star schema for a source database; and model-driven reporting.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cGiven today\u2019s volatility, many enterprises have either slowed down or paused updates to their applications. However, their customers are relying on them to innovate more now than ever before. The capabilities represented by these patents enable IT organizations to continue to rapidly drive value for their customers while mitigating risk to the business,\u201d said Rewari.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Plutora\u2019s Davis also sees a trend towards predictive analytics. \u201cThe good news is you now have all this information. The bad news is, you now have all this information. How do you take that information and make meaningful insights out of it?” asked Davis. He sees more of a move toward capabilities that help users understand their data better and make smarter decisions.<\/span><\/p>\n

Standardization. <\/b>As more vendors try to come into the space, there needs to be a way to standardize or formalize the capabilities so people don\u2019t get confused, according to Davis. \u201cWe have to standardize\u2026 integrations can\u2019t be the differentiator,\u201d he said. Everyone should have integrations because they are so critical to connecting the tools and gaining the awareness of what\u2019s going on. \u201cThere is going to be a lot of need to better standardize, better understand the differences between simple field mapping and complicated logic in terms of how these tools are being used,\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>\n

VSM 2.0. <\/b>We are still in the early stages or 1.0 phase of value stream management, but HCL\u2019s Schuck sees VSM 2.0 on the horizon. \u201cWe are close to crossing the line of value stream management being a nice to have or cool new thing to VSM becoming an essential in your toolbox,\u201d he explained. \u201cVSM 2.0 comes with customer success, customer use cases, and VSM coaches. Right now, we\u2019re in the thought leadership stage with lots of DevOps experts talking about the benefits of VSM and practitioners testing the VSM waters. We\u2019ll see more people diving into value stream management once big companies have well-established VSM programs, broadcast their results from these programs, and start hiring VSM coaches or other VSM-specific roles.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Value stream management platforms vs. value stream delivery platforms<\/b>
\nResearch firm Gartner splits the value stream management tooling landscape into two areas: value stream management platforms and value stream delivery platforms.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

According to the research firm, \u201cDevOps value stream management platforms (VSMPs) enable organizations to optimize end-to-end product delivery lead time. These platforms provide greater visibility and traceability into the flow of all product delivery processes, from ideation to release and operation.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

While, \u201cDevOps value stream delivery platforms (VSDPs) provide a fully integrated set of capabilities to enable continuous delivery of software. These capabilities may include project or product planning, build automation, continuous integration, test automation, continuous deployment and rollback, release orchestration, and automated security policy enforcement, and may provide visibility to key value stream metrics.\u201d.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Gartner believes VSMPs should be used:<\/span><\/p>\n