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What is Value Stream Managementand How Do I Use It?

A value stream is the sequence of activities an organization undertakes to deliver on a customer need. Customers may be external (customer-facing value streams) or internal (value-enabling value streams).

Software delivery organizations have a value stream per product, application or service.

The answer is Flow Metrics. Flow Metrics hone in on business value, namely how much business value you are delivering today, and where you can invest your dollars and talent to deliver more value, faster, tomorrow.

Flow Metrics:

• Are constructed from the combined work of all the contributing practitioners across the value stream.

• Create a clear set of end-to-end value stream metrics that can be shared by both IT and business leaders.

• Abstract away details like team structure, technical architecture and tool implementations.

What is Value Stream Management (VSM)?Value Stream Management is a technique that focuses on increasing the flow of business

value from customer request to customer delivery.

Its systematic approach to measuring and improving flow helps organizations:

Shorten time-to-market

Increase throughput

Improve product quality

Optimize business outcomes

What is a value stream in software delivery?

Features Risks

Defects Debts

New business value, pulled by customerRequest | Epic | Story | Requirement | …

Security, availability, compliance, pulled by risk officersRisk | Security | Vulnerability | …

Quality improvements, pulled by customerDefect | Bug | Issue | …

Improving code or ways of work, pulled by architectsTech Debt | …

FlowItem Types

Knowledge work is sorted into four types

of value creation

What flows through a software delivery value stream?

What should I measure in software delivery value streams?

How can I measure flow across heterogenous toolchains?In practical terms, getting actionable real-time visibility into end-to-end flow requires:

1 2 3The ability to capture data from any tool without interruption—isolated from third-party changes and tool upgrades—and without destabilizing the tools’ daily operation.

The ability to join and abstract the data from the individual tools into one integrated set of Flow Metrics.

The ability to view the data sliced-and-diced through the business lens, so that software delivery perfor-mance can be correlated to business results.

Once armed with visibility into the flow of your product value streams, you can get to problem-solving.You can identify where flow slows down—where a constraint is impeding business value delivery—and start doing what’s needed to relieve the bottleneck. Then, you move on to the next bottleneck, and so on and so forth.

Turnkey, purpose-built value stream management tools can provide Flow Metrics within days.

Get the full story on Value Stream Management and learn about the Flow Framework® to guide and measure your organization’s ability to achieve innovation velocity. https://www.tasktop.com/value-stream-management

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