Elevate Agile-Plus-DevOps With Value Stream Management

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Elevate Agile-Plus-DevOps With Value Stream

Management
VSM Is Poised To Take Over Where Application Life Cycle Management Leaves Off
by Christopher Condo and Diego Lo Giudice

April 20, 2018
Why Read This Report Key Takeaways

Practicing value stream management (VSM) VSM Ties Agile-Plus-DevOps To The Business
allows companies to make their Agile plus Agile and DevOps are key transformation
development and operations (DevOps) practices for software delivery teams. But they
development environments into real digital are not enough. VSM helps them identify waste
business drivers. With VSM, organizations and focus on value — and provides end-to-end
implementing Agile-plus-DevOps will better visibility to all stakeholders.
understand the value they deliver, the efficiencies
Uncover And Accelerate Agile-Plus-DevOps ROI
they gain, and the further optimization
VSM tools capture performance measures such
possibilities for each software product in
as mean time to repair (MTTR), cycle time, and
their delivery pipeline. This report introduces
cost of delay. These inform product plans and
application development and delivery (AD&D)
priorities and point to ways to further optimize
pros to VSM and maps some of the vendors
software delivery and quality.
converging on this new market.
Vendors Come From Different Perspectives
Vendors of VSM tools come from various
backgrounds, and each leverages existing assets
to deliver them. But none today provide a full-
fledged VSM solution.
forrester.com
For Application Development & Delivery Professionals
Elevate Agile-Plus-DevOps With Value Stream Management

by Christopher Condo and Diego Lo Giudice

with Christopher Mines, Jeffrey S. Hammond, Amy Homan, and Andrew Reese
April 20, 2018
Table Of Contents Related Research Documents

2 The Time Is Right For VSM Faster Software Delivery Will Accelerate Digital
Transformation
Defining Value Stream Management
Organize Your App-Dev Teams With Agile And
6 VSM Capabilities And Benefits Emerge
DevOps
7 Vendors Bring Varied Perspectives To VSM
The State Of Agile 2017: Agile At Scale
Tools
Recommendations
9 Take The Initial Steps Toward Value Stream

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For Application Development & Delivery Professionals April 20, 2018
The Time Is Right For VSM

AD&D leaders have worked hard over the last decade or more to implement the practices and tools of
modern software development: application life cycle management (ALM), Agile, and DevOps. But even
organizations that are well advanced on this journey find that their software development efforts suffer from:
›› A lack of visibility at the portfolio level. Organizations have been investing in continuous
integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) to automate end-to-end workflow for individual
products, yet they still aren’t able to track work in progress in aggregate, at a portfolio level, to
ensure customers receive value in a timely manner.
“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.” (Paul Elia, group vice president and DevOps center for
enablement lead, SunTrust Bank)
›› Fragmented visibility along the product pipeline. Dev teams are most likely getting by using
manual reporting and tracking methods, often in a spreadsheet or project planning tool. These
result in a piecemeal view of the end-to-end delivery life cycle. And these views are static, so teams
can’t react to them to fix things.
“We need to answer questions like: ‘Where are the constraints?’ ‘Do we add more people?’ or ‘Do
we do something else?’ We wanted to create a model of the value stream, model the artifacts
flowing and metrics coming from that, and take action. That is now how we are moving forward.”
(Carmen DeArdo, head of DevOps, Nationwide Insurance)
›› Poor management and optimization of development pipelines. In large enterprises, software

product development is composed of multiple, parallel workstreams, each with different technologies,
different milestones, and different artifacts. In this environment, governance is intractable, integrity
hard to maintain, and feeding and correlating different metrics for different stakeholders impossible.
“We’ve learned a lot from our own transformation to Agile, as well as from our clients. We started
our journey with a clear focus on value. We soon learned that visibility — not just of value being
created, but also of waste — is relevant. What is clogging up the flow, where can we eliminate
waste? For example, where is technical debt accumulating? You are fooling yourself if you are only
looking at value, to optimize value — you have to look at waste.” (Michelle Shuttleworth, managing
director, consulting methods and tools, Deloitte Consulting)
›› Weak methodologies to guide continuous improvement. Even with automated tools, AD&D
leaders, business leaders, and IT managers aren’t always sure which metrics they should capture
and use as key performance indicators (KPIs) to set the baseline for their continuous improvement
initiatives. They are floundering in data overload from islands of automation and struggling to make
sense of it all.
© 2018 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. 2
Citations@forrester.com or +1 866-367-7378
Defining Value Stream Management
A term with roots in Lean Manufacturing, a value stream is the sequence of activities an organization
undertakes to deliver on a customer request or need.1 In the context of software development,
Forrester defines value stream management (VSM) as:
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.
Enterprises that are modernizing their application delivery with Agile, DevOps, and other enabling tools
and processes often struggle to prove that their transformation is delivering real value. VSM enables
organizations to go much further, by helping to (see Figure 1):
›› Analyze and map value streams. Value stream mapping helps identify and resolve disconnects,
redundancies, and gaps at the process, resource, and technology level to deliver customer
outcomes in the customer journey.2
›› Visualize value streams. Business strategists, product owners, development, and testing and
delivery leads — can visualize where waste is forming in the flow and where value is generated or
lost, as well as all related financial and technical metrics worth monitoring to govern and optimize
work (see Figure 2):
“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.” (Carmen DeArdo,
head of DevOps, Nationwide Insurance)
›› Govern value streams. Once stakeholders analyze and map their value streams, they can plan
and manage products and portfolios; allocate resources, artifacts, work items, and releases as they
flow through the pipeline; and fine-tune throughput. VSM also enables dev teams to govern tools,
control releases, and trigger integrity enforcement.
FIGURE 1 Look For Tools That Offer Distinct Mapping, Visualization, And Governance Capabilities
Mapping Visualization Governance

• VS graphical editor • Plans • Planning
• Analysis • Metrics • Product portfolios
• What if • Financials • Products
• Risk • Costs • Financials
• Process, people, data • Value delivered • Costs
• Lead time, process time • Predictive analysis • Value
• Flow • Tools management
• Role-based views • Management of artifacts,
work items, flow, throughput
• Release control, triggers
• Integrity enforcement
Core
• Integration with other tools • Interoperability • Common data model for
artifacts
FIGURE 2 Visualize Value And Waste In The Value Stream
Value stream to improve: LT: Lead time

app delivery PT: Process time
Business
Improvement: LT by 75% VA: Value-adding process time
Customer Expected benefit: faster NVA: Nonvalue-adding (waste)
request time-to-market
Business
Requirements Design Develop and
submits Build Test
generated specified integrate
idea
Business
Account analysts/
Developer Developer Developer Tester
team business
partner
LT: 2 days LT: 8 days LT: 30 days LT: 30 days LT: 3 days LT: 40 days
PT: 1 day PT: 5 days PT: 7 days PT: 20 days PT: 1 hour PT: 5 days
VA
NVA
Stage and An LT of 123 days

deploy Business versus a PT of 39
days means work
Value delivered is sitting idle for
Ops
to customer 84 days! What’s
blocking it?
LT: 10 days Total LT: 123 days
PT: 4 hours Total PT: 39 days
VA
NVA
VSM Capabilities And Benefits Emerge

Value stream management provides greater transparency, measurement, and control of the software
delivery pipeline. It allows product managers to view progress and coordinate features to a schedule, it
allows AD&D leaders to find waste in their software delivering tool chain and reduce or remove it using
automation, and it allows release teams to manage and govern the release process. The capabilities
and benefits VSM customers expect are to:
›› Connect people. VSM connects each role in the software delivery process, from strategic
planners, project managers, business analysts, QA, and developers all the way to IT operations.
This provides a product manager with badly-needed visibility into the delivery schedule to
orchestrate delivering initiatives across the business. IT ops can also see what’s coming down the
pipeline more easily.
›› Get real-time reporting across multiple software delivery pipelines. When properly
implemented, VSM provides comprehensive updates on status, activities, ROI, and critical KPIs
such as MTTR, cycle time, and resource utilization. As VSM tools evolve, they will perform what-if
analyses, and provide information across multiple, heterogeneous tool chains at both product and
portfolio levels.
›› Enable opinionated points of view. A VSM capability will better connect an organization’s
business team with its engineering and delivery teams. Individual stakeholders should have a
distinct view so they can get the information they need to make critical decisions like go/no-go or
understand where to invest in optimization.
›› Support sustainable continuous improvement processes. Almost every organization has made
continuous improvement its goal, yet many teams flounder in a sea of data and log files and
can’t seem to pick meaningful KPIs or capture them in a sustainable way. VSM capabilities will
solve this problem by continuously providing metrics that provide ready-to-use KPIs to support
continuous improvement.
›› Provide greater visibility and analytics that focus the entire team on delivered value. AD&D
leaders will gain greater visibility into the software delivery cycle, greater predictability, and
improved product planning. Those who are dealing with legacy tools and processes face threats
from increasingly sophisticated competitors unburdened by technical debt — and they need VSM
to understand their inefficiencies and help set priorities for modernization.
›› Support strategic planning. VSM will help business, AD&D, and IT leaders collectively and
strategically plan new product lines and capabilities — using actual data from the existing systems
of operation.
Vendors Bring Varied Perspectives To VSM Tools

While mature Agile and Lean practices are prerequisites for VSM success, tooling will also play an
important role. There is no complete VSM solution in the market today, but vendors from both ends
of the software dev toolchain are paying attention and augmenting their existing tools with VSM
capabilities. Those looking to adopt VSM tools will discover that vendors are approaching it from
multiple angles (see Figure 3):
›› Agile planning and ALM. Intland Software’s primary focus has been Agile planning and ALM, while
Blueprint Software’s heritage is in requirements management and ALM. Panaya has roots in testing
and enterprise Agile planning for the packaged world of SAP and Salesforce.
›› The ‘dev’ of DevOps. CloudBees, GitLab, Microsoft, and IBM have strong developer roots and stress
capabilities to capture CI/CD metrics, pipeline visibility, and software development flow governance.
›› The ‘ops’ of DevOps. Electic Cloud, Plutora, and XebiaLabs deliver strong release automation
capability; their VSM tools focus on the orchestration of multiple release streams and visually
connecting those release streams back to their originating work items.
›› Agile ALM plus DevOps. Atlassian, CA Technologies, CollabNet-VersionOne, and Micro Focus
combine ALM tools with DevOps tools to provide broad end-to-end dev and deploy solutions, but these
may not be deep in each of the specific VSM capabilities such as end-to-end value stream visualization.
›› Enabling technologies. 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.
FIGURE 3 Know Where Your Early VSM Entrants Come From To Expect What You Can Get
SOLUTION
CI/CD
ALM Release
automation
CloudBees
Intland
CollabNet/
Software VersionOne
Blueprint Electric
VALUE Panaya Software CA Cloud
STREAM Microsoft Technologies
(Upstream/ IBM (Downstream/

Micro Xebia-
requirements/ deployment)
Focus Labs
design) Plutora
Tasktop
ENABLING
TECHNOLOGIES
Recommendations
Take The Initial Steps Toward Value Stream Management Now

Don’t wait for the VSM market to settle down before making your move. Many of the offerings
can provide immediate help with driving greater value delivery in your software delivery process.
Experimenting with VSM is a must-do for AD&D pros who want to mature their organization’s Agile-
plus-DevOps journey. Take these initial steps to get started:
›› Get educated on VSM. Chief technology officers or CIOs should familiarize themselves with VSM
and its ability to provide a connected, business-oriented view of the capability and performance of
the software delivering pipeline.
›› Conduct a VS mapping exercise. This will help organizations understand where their current
software delivery pipeline generates waste and value. They will soon realize the value that comes
from this exercise.
›› Evaluate your vendor’s VSM offering. Look at your current vendor’s VSM offerings and compare
them to the Forrester definition of a fully capable VSM tool. AD&D leaders often don’t realize
they can leverage this capability using what they have. How much effort exploiting VSM will take
depends on the extent to which their vendors have supported VSM.
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Endnotes
The term value stream as coined by James Womack, Daniel Jones and Daniel Roos in the following books that
1
launched the Lean movement. Source: Daniel T. Jones, Daniel Roos, and James P. Womack, The Machine That
Changed the World, Free Press, 2007.
Source: Daniel T. Jones and James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation,
Productivity Press, 2003.
For a graphical visualization of what a value stream looks like, see the Forrester report “Faster Software Delivery Will
Accelerate Digital Transformation.”
Source: Karen Martin and Mike Osterling, Value stream mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for
2
Organizational Transformation, McGraw-Hill Education, 2013.
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NOT LICENSED FOR DISTRIBUTION

Elevate Agile-Plus-DevOps With Value Stream

by Christopher Condo and Diego Lo Giudice

Why Read This Report Key Takeaways

Elevate Agile-Plus-DevOps With Value Stream Management

by Christopher Condo and Diego Lo Giudice

Table Of Contents Related Research Documents

9 Take The Initial Steps Toward Value Stream

Forrester Research, Inc., 60 Acorn Park Drive, Cambridge, MA 02140 USA

The Time Is Right For VSM

›› Poor management and optimization of development pipelines. In large enterprises, software

Defining Value Stream Management

Mapping Visualization Governance

FIGURE 2 Visualize Value And Waste In The Value Stream

Value stream to improve: LT: Lead time

Stage and An LT of 123 days

VSM Capabilities And Benefits Emerge

Vendors Bring Varied Perspectives To VSM Tools

(Upstream/ IBM (Downstream/

Take The Initial Steps Toward Value Stream Management Now

Engage With An Analyst

Analyst Inquiry Analyst Advisory Webinar

Forrester’s research apps for iOS and Android.

Organizational Transformation, McGraw-Hill Education, 2013.

Forrester’s research and insights are tailored to your role and

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