Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) recently published their DevOps 2021 research that forecasts nearly 50% growth in Value Stream Management (VSM) vendor penetration during 2020 with a further 20% growth in 2021, and suggest VSM vendors appear to be delivering against market expectations. The slow start speaks to the difficulty in integrating the expansive toolchains that make up the software delivery lifecycle (SDLC).
InfoQ spoke to Jeff Keyes, vice president of product at Plutora, a leading VSM platform provider to understand what VSM adoption involves, how it can have a transformative impact and how it can fail.
InfoQ: How do organisations typically estimate and monitor value delivered?
Keyes: Most organisations utilise existing project portfolio management (PPM) software to monitor expected value and cost expenditure for major projects and product initiatives. The tracking of the actual value is much less documented, and many organisations lack the maturity to monitor this due to a lack of clarity on the term ‘value’, and what it really means. While most organisations will track improved metrics and cost actuals, not many are quantifying what value really means, therefore making it harder to monitor. This becomes particularly challenging when technology products or services aren’t identified as a value stream. VSM quickly highlights the problems here.
InfoQ: How much confusion do you think there is in the marketplace between the terms value stream mapping and value stream management?
Keyes: There is definitely a lot of confusion in the market between the two terms. With the introduction of agile and lean methodologies into the tech world many years ago, many people have become comfortable with the concept of mapping a value stream and what this means.
Value stream mapping is not process mapping; rather it’s a high-level, bird’s-eye view over the value stream. By thinking of a value stream as a collection of processes we can better understand the goals of value stream mapping. A value stream map enumerates every step of the software value stream, while the mapping exercise identifies processes that need intervention. Value stream management takes this a step further, capturing the flow of work throughout a value stream, identifying how well the value stream is performing and any opportunities to improve it.
InfoQ: How do value stream management platforms aim to join the dots here?
Keyes: VSM platforms bring value stream maps into an ongoing process that aims to continuously improve the value delivered to customers. They do this by operating with an integration model that converges toolchains into a common data model, that then delivers end-to-end visibility and traceability across the value stream. Enterprises no longer need to translate data from one tool to another in a spreadsheet to understand what is going on in the system as a whole. Instead, the deep insights that come from analysing and visualising a wide and diverse data set using the same terms are now accessible, allowing organisations to make data-driven decisions and innovate faster while managing risk. And they manage risk by automating governance, ensuring continuous compliance as work moves through the SDLC.
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