Value Stream Management Platform: the 10,000 ft. View

Software CIOs and development executives at any large company today are focused on two priorities: drive product value while meeting the company’s strategic goals. You’re leaders. You should be using leaders’ tools. This is where a value stream management platform comes in.

A Value Stream Management Platform (VSMP), such as Guide-Rails_®, gives you the visualizations and integrated tools to completely optimize your delivery workflow and software development from end to end. Whatever your business goals, from product quality, to executing a Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®), implementing DevOps, and increasing release velocity, a VSMP gives you and your teams all the planning and production tools in one system.

Value Stream Management (VSM)

Value stream management for software products is focused on customers – and creates value to delight and retain them. It guides you to develop software products through an integrated, systemic approach with constant feedback on results. The value stream map shows all aspects of the software delivery processes, and where the bottlenecks and delays occur. This gives product managers, developers, DevOps managers, leadership, and release managers the visibility necessary to uncover problems and continuously improve the process. Simply put: leadership tools.

A Value Stream Management Platforms’ critical capability is to integrate with tools and toolchains used for software development and deliver end-to-end traceability and visibility across this value stream by converging into a common data model.

Suddenly, data doesn’t have to be translated from one tool to another in a spreadsheet. This allows organizations to analyze enormous data sets and innovate faster through data-driven insights.

Why Apply Value Stream Mapping Strategies?

VSM has emerged as a key strategic framework for helping executive teams respond to urgent transformation objectives. If you’re a lean business targeting the end-to-end flow of value, value stream mapping can get you there:

• Improve effectiveness: With VSM, you’ll be in a solid, data-based position to articulate and define ideas that maximize planning and prioritization. Your team will ultimately deliver customer value more effectively.

• Boost alignment: VSM offers new ways of creating enhanced decision-making and trust, it helps to boost alignment by ultimately bringing together teams from across the enterprise.

• Maximize efficiency: VSM equips the teams to plan, develop, and prioritize value streams to fuel agility at an unprecedented scale. Teams can boost the velocity and efficiency of their value streams by synchronizing capacity and resources with business priorities.

How the Features of a Good Value Stream Management Platform Work

Built on the lean principles that revolutionized manufacturing productivity in the latter half of the 20th century, the VSMP has brought lean thinking to software development. It’s actually possible to identify steps that add value or those that create waste if an organization manages software delivery through value streams. This includes detecting where there are defects, delays, or re-work being created, and helps to optimize the flow of work to remove that waste.

The process begins with a current-state value stream map, which clearly displays each step of the software value stream. Value stream mapping works by drawing together stakeholders from across the value stream into a single session to capture all hand-offs and activities in the software delivery process.

A VSMP includes all activities – from design to production – that are needed in the process of delivering software products or services to customers. Because the value of the software products is ultimately determined by the customer, now you can improve its value through platform support. Each step in the value stream mapping process is customer-centric in terms of value. The process enhances the ability to wow and retain customers while optimizing ROI through time and resource savings. While the product moves through the build process into development and testing, it must increase value to the customer in each step along the way.

When you do it right, you will realize the full value of the effort. We’ll make sure you get there.

Guide Rails’ Solution

Software development always aims to maximize value delivery to customers and businesses — but how can inefficiencies be identified in the process, and how can they be course-corrected to deliver obvious value? Guide Rails’ value stream management will show you how to visualize the end-to-end business DevOps workstream to target and identify inefficiencies and waste.

Soon, you’ll find your team catching obvious DevOps goof-ups in their planning processes. Then you’ll see them modifying the production process for more time savings and quality modifications. Watch them proceed to make small changes with each learning cycle. Then watch how your customer appreciation grows through value and quality, and your ROI accrues.

It was all designed throughout the early years of Toyota manufacturing, and it’s all dedicated to accelerating customer delivery and extreme product satisfaction among customers. Toyota quality controls over the years showed us all how it’s done. And, of course, it has only improved over time.

Think of it as high-velocity workstream optimization for all the right reasons.

Let Guide Rails provide you with a complimentary value-stream mapping assessment, which will identify and chart the people, processes, and tools in your value stream and how they interact. We’ll show how you can deliver software faster and get the best value out of your value stream management platform.

Additional Resources

• Software engineers have ideas and the ability to work on things that matter; just trust them and watch as the Guide-Rails_® execute everything safely.

• Building the business case for a Value Stream Delivery Platform can be difficult, start estimating your cost savings with the Guide-Rails_® Value Analysis Calculator

For more information, please contact us today. We’d like to help.