Mind the Gap: Bridging the Divide Between the Business and Agile/DevOps Teams with Value Stream Management

26 April 2018© Tasktop
Mind the Gap:
Bridging the Divide Between the Business and Agile/DevOps
Teams with Value Stream Management
featuring

Meet Your Presenters
Nicole Bryan
Vice President,
Product
Tasktop
Christopher
Condo
Senior Analyst
Forrester

We work with business and
technology leaders to develop
customer-obsessed strategies
that drive growth.
4© 2017 FORRESTER. REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED.

Questions To Be Answered
› Is Agile + DevOps enough to have a successful Digital
Transformation?
› What is Value Stream Management and how could it help a
large organization?
› How does Value Stream Management bridge the gap
between the business and your Agile and DevOps teams?

Transforming the business to be customer focused
and deliver value directly to the customer via digital
capabilities.
Digital Transformation:

Agile + DevOps underpins any MAD organization!
Agile
DevOps
The Ferrari
The motorway

Source: Faster Software Delivery Will Accelerate Digital Transformation Forrester report

Product teams
leverage Shared
Services to
accomplish
specialized
tasks.
Shared Resource
teams measure
success by the success
of product teams

Micro Service
Architectures:
1. Enables Product-
Centric Teams
2. Enables Agile
Release Strategies
3. Simplifies Test
And Maintenance

Should be Easy Peasy, Right?

Only 21% of companies
believe they have completed
their Digital Transformation!
Forrester Report:
The Sorry State of Digital
Transformation,
Ted Schadler

Executives
Overestimate
DevOps Maturity

Can VSM Help?

Value Stream Management, As Defined by Forrester:
A combination of people, process, and technology
that maps, optimizes, visualizes, and governs
business value flow (including epics, stories, work
items) through heterogeneous enterprise software
delivery pipelines. Value stream management tools
are the technology underpinnings of VSM practice.

Practicing Value
Stream
Management
Identify, Measure,
and Monitor
processes to
eliminate waste
and to improve
outcomes

Paul Elia, Group Vice President and
DevOps Center for Enablement Lead
"As we scale our Agile and DevOps journey at enterprise
and portfolio levels, we want everybody to visualize the
process for delivering products to customers. We want
stakeholders to see where their epics are in the life cycle,
show progress, show if items are done or not done, all
the way from left or concept, to the right or cash."

Issues Addressed by Value Stream Management
› Lack of visibility at the portfolio level
› Fragmented visibility along the product pipeline
› Poor management and optimization of development pipelines
› Weak methodologies to guide continuous improvement
methodologies.

VSM Tools Are Emerging To Facilitate The
Practice of Value Stream Management

VSM Tool
Capabilities
Are
Emerging,
And
Evolving

Source: Build The Right Software Better And Faster With Agile And DevOps Metrics Forrester report
$$$
VSM tools link
each part of
the business to
the value
stream

Factors driving demand for VSM
› Organizations desire more end to end visibility.
› More teams are looking to capture metrics such as MTTR, Cycle
time, backlog rates, escape defect ratios, etc.
› Shift to micro-services means more teams and more metrics to
capture.
› In order to continuously improve, you need to continuously
measure!

Customers See Potential with VSM Tools
Carmen DeArdo,
Head of DevOps, Nationwide Insurance
“We had visibility of our lead times and waste from code automation to
deployment, and are perfecting that, but still felt the need to also have
visibility on the left-hand side (of the pipeline), PPM and PM, where
we were blind on constraints on where flow was going.”

Mind the Gap: Bridging the Divide Between the Business and Agile/DevOps Teams with Value Stream Management

Core Problem
How do you improve Time to Value?
Despite Agile & DevOps, organizations find
themselves unable to accelerate delivery fast
enough to preempt or react rapidly to disruptions
from startups and competition

Think Value Streams
Connect Your Value Streams

What is Value Stream Thinking?

Value Stream Thinking
Value Stream thinking puts the customer in the center
You ask: How can we provide greater value to our customer, while
o Eliminating delays
o Improving quality
o Reducing costs, labor and employee frustration
You zoom out of the details and take a macro look at activities occurring as
you are building software in order to identify strategic ways to improve them
You need to document (“map”) the flow of value (the activities) and gather
measurements for each stage

What does a software value stream look like?
Common problem when adopting value stream thinking is a very linear concept of value delivery
Because it came from manufacturing…
But that is the wrong model for application development and delivery, which combines a very creative product
development phase with a very repeatable product release stage and then again a creative support phase
It is nearly impossible to optimize a process, when there is a big misunderstanding of its mechanics

True End-to-End Value Stream Thinking
The question is where do you place the
value stream goal posts?
o Agile focuses from backlog to code
commit
o DevOps focuses from code commit to
production
Neither has set the goal posts broad
enough … starting with customer, ending
with customer… and truly everything in
between

So How Do You Do It?
Connecting Your Value Stream

Let’s go back to our traffic analogy

Essentially you need to create your
map.. Starting with the activities

But this is essentially like
a map with no roads …

Ugh … so what do you do?
You must connect your value stream!!!

Activities don’t just
happen on their own…
… they are performed via
artifacts ….
… that live in tools

An incredibly
rich “digital
footprint”

This digital footprint can
turn your roadless map …

Into a real time, information
rich, Waze-worthy map

Digital Footprint = Connected Value Stream
Model-Based Integration

• Complexity is such that
essentially you need a
normalization layer
• Need to be able to flow
artifacts to many different
tools to complete your
network
• Scalability!

To Summarize …

Think True End to End Value Stream

Connect Your Value Stream
Create the information
rich digital footprint

Using Model-Based Integration

Achieve True Visibility & Real Time Insights
Improve Time to Value

"Tasktop provides integration
capabilities across a broad range of
DevOps tooling – a core VSM capability
that enables traceability, visibility, and
connections between the people,
process, and technology.”
Forrester Research,
Inc., says “the time is
right for VSM”

Any Questions?

Mind the Gap: Bridging the Divide Between the Business and Agile/DevOps Teams with Value Stream Management

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