value stream management

As modern business gets faster and leaner, business leaders face problems with resources and insights. Leaner operations mean fewer resources in budgets, staffing and time, while available resources must often be shared across more of the business. At the same time, the business needs more real-time data driven insights to make better business decisions — what works, what doesn’t and what needs to change.

Establishing a value stream lets a business to understand costs as well as the value those costs are creating. VSM applies value stream management tools and processes to the value stream to generate useful data and drive optimizations earlier with measurable outcomes. VSM can do the following:

• identify unprofitable activities, which can be improved, optimized, changed or discarded;
• identify bottlenecks and waste;
• identify resource limitations and resource contention;
• gather and report metrics such as cycle time, flow time, wait time, and customer satisfaction and experience;
• shift funding to more agile and profit-centered activities; and
• ensure that activities — and corresponding spend — are aligned with business goals.

Software development and delivery are increasingly influenced by value stream and VSM concepts. Although paradigms such as Agile, DevOps and other development approaches have vastly accelerated and improved software creation, businesses still grapple with dependencies on shared resources and search for greater process insights and auditability. By layering VSM considerations on top of continuous deployment paradigms, a business can better manage those dependencies, optimize workflows along the development pipeline, enhance agile work methodologies, and drive greater levels of automation and management control in software development.