Value Stream Management Buyer's Guide

Value Stream Management A GUIDE FOR BUYERS

www.sdtimes.com

December 2019

SD Times

Buyers Guide

Getting the most value out of your value streams

BY CHRISTINA CARDOZA

O

rganizations cannot ignore today’s ongoing digital transformation. With every company now becoming a software company, if software isn’t being created correctly and quickly enough, industry pundits argue, companies are going to find it difficult to stay alive.

“There is a digital transformation going on and if you are not changing the way you are doing things in order to deliver software better and quicker, you are going to lose competitive advantage and become irrelevant as a company,” said Lance Knight, COO GM of ConnectALL, a value stream integration company.

While there have been all these methodologies applied to creating better software faster, like Agile and DevOps, organizations are quickly realizing these are not enough. “All these things you need to be able to deliver software quicker, but just because you can program it and have it ready doesn’t mean you are getting it to production quicker,” said Knight.

What Agile and DevOps has enabled teams to do is start to think end to end, but there has been a piece missing to achieving clearer results, according to Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop, a software tool integration company. “We somehow ended up pigeonholing everything we measure and everything we focus on. It is siloed thinking. Agile was never meant to be a silo. DevOps was never meant to be a silo. They were meant to be around val-

ue streams,” he said.

Value stream is the flow of work throughout the delivery process. “If I don’t look at the system from one point to the other, it doesn’t matter how quickly I can deploy. I can deploy every minute, but if I am not getting something new every minute does that really matter?” asked Knight.

Value stream aligns DevOps and Agile transformations with the business in order to uncover areas of opportunities for improvement, according to Eric Robertson, VP of product marketing and management at CollabNet VersionOne, an Agile planning, DevOps and VSM software provider.

“Agile and DevOps produced great technical outcomes that efficiently got out products and produced output, but the question is was that output or release meaningful to the business? Did it drive any meaning or help achieve the type of outcome the business needs in order to be successful?” Robertson said. “It is great to get to deliver products sooner... but in the end if it is not meeting the customer need or the business objective it doesn’t matter. You can’t say you are delivering value. You are delivering output, you are delivering something. But you are not driving value,” he continued.

The value stream lays out how everyone in the business is delivering value and what their role is overall, explained Robertson.

“Customers want speed with direction, and that is really what value stream

management provides. Agile brought a lot to the equation in terms of optimizing the development cycle, but it was pretty narrow. DevOps expanded that point of view, but the focus for DevOps ended up being around automation,” added Brian Muskoff, director of DevOps strategy at HCL Technologies, IT and digital solutions provider.

Additionally, there have been many shifts happening in terms of architecture approaches, such as microservices and the move to the cloud. In order to properly track features, epics and progress, teams need to understand if they are improving development and delivery velocity.

“We demand visibility and transparency from every other part of the organization; value stream management lets us put a methodology and system in place that gives us transparency, visibility and governance independent of the level of automation and independent of the tooling that is there to help us start improving work that is going on in these teams,” said Jeff Keyes, director of product marketing for software company Plutora.

Getting the value out of value stream In most organizations, software delivery value streams are grown organically.

Throughout the years, organizations have documented and changed up their workflows. However, their organic value streams weren’t created or crafted with continued on page 4 >

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The emerging role of value stream managers in software delivery Managing the value stream has to be a human process, according to Lance Knight, COO of ConnectALL, a value stream integration company.

Part of a successful value stream is having an analysis in place where you map, measure, and look how things flow throughout delivery. “You can do a lot of stuff with a tool, but the tool isn’t going to do software or value stream analysis for you. It is a human you need to go in and look at it. There is no tool that is going to go out and look at all the things you do in your value stream and tell you what to do,” Knight explained.

Value stream manager is an emerging role in software delivery that aims to add the human element to value stream management. The value stream manager is in charge of making sure everything can flow, removing impediments, and getting releases out the door.

According to Knight, a value stream manager has more of a product owner or project manager background and will look at how work gets done, and try to make it more effective.

< continued from page 3

the notion of how things can flow easily, nor grown with efficiency in mind, according to ConnectALL’s Knight.

He explained that in order to understand the value stream, it starts with education. “If I were going to start today, I would really try to get as much education about value stream mapping, lean principles, waste and study systems thinking, so I can look at these things and do an optimization exercise, analyze the value stream, map it out and decide what tools I want to put in place based on that,” he said.

Once there is comprehensive understanding, HCL’s Muskoff explained the best practice for getting started is to start small. “It is pretty much a best IT practice in general. You want to start small, get some wings and establish a benchmark. Then, try to make some improvements day over day. That is a great place to start.”

Improvements should continue to be applied as an organization journeys down the value stream. “The team has to want to get better, and the only way to do that is to take an honest look at your practices and identify areas of improvement, focus on bottlenecks, and exploit those bottlenecks to increase flow,” Muskoff added.

CollabNet’s Roberston said beginning with objectives and key results

Brian Muskoff, director of DevOps strategy at HCL Technologies, an IT and digital solutions provider, said a value stream manager also needs to come from a technical background like a developer and tester as well as have general management skills. “They need to be a good communicator, organized, have attention to detail, have the ability to take a current situation and identify areas of improvement, and actually deliver on those improvements,” he said.

HCL has been experimenting with its own value stream manager internally, who they say is essential to their process. The HCL value stream manager takes on the role of Scrum master or release manager, being in charge of teams to get product shipped out the door, but also focuses on continuous improvement or process improvement. “The value stream manager is very much a necessity,” Muskoff said. “We are evolving. We are recognizing the importance of process improvement and formalizing it.” z —Christina Cardoza

(OKRs) can also help companies quickly identify outcome hypotheses and provide more insights into what they are trying to achieve down the line.“That input of taking, identifying and prioritizing those business opportunities will help you start planning, start creating, start delivering and also be able to pivot and learn,” he explained.

Additionally, businesses should be able to break down those outcomes and objectives and individually map them through the value stream. Value stream mapping enables users to understand what to look at, find bottlenecks, look into why things are taking so long, and remove waste, according to ConnectALL’s Knight.

According to Tasktop’s Kersten, in order to get the most value out of the value stream, you should start with the customer. While everyone is jumping on the notion of value stream and how important it is, the way it is being translated into customer results and thought about with customers within a large organization is “completely rife with confusion,” he explained. The problem is that organizations don’t know where a value stream starts. “You need to be aligned with a customer goal. If your value stream doesn’t start with a customer, you are doing something wrong.

You have to measure what the customer

is seeing in terms of delivery,” he said.

It is not only external customers that organizations need to look at, Kersten explained. There are many internal value streams and internal customers that need to be considered also. If you are not treating your internal services as their own value streams, “with its own roadmap, with its own resources, instead of teams behind it, you are not going to help those customer-facing apps. If you are not treating your value stream network, your toolchain itself, as a product, you are also not going to get the kind of results you are seeking,” he said.

And don’t boil the ocean with millions of metrics, HCL’s Muskoff warned.

DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) has provided four key metrics organizations can look at to help bring bottlenecks and waste to light: lead time, deployment frequency, mean time to repair, and change fail rate. Muskoff does note that each organization is going to have their own key performance indicators that are important to them, but the four DORA metrics are a good place to start.

The right tools can help provide that visibility, but it needs to be able to see what is happening across the entire portfolio, Plutora’s Keyes explained. “If you can’t see what is happening in one continued on page 7 >

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Integration & Common Data Model

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< continued from page 4

pipeline, then you can’t see what is happening across the portfolio. You need to have visibility into dependencies and related activities,” he said. Tools should also be able to take into account heterogeneous methodologies because teams will be doing a mixture of Agile, DevOps and even waterfall. It also shouldn’t matter what type of tool a team is using.

Data should be standardized across the value stream so you can understand how to relate it all and see what’s going on, Keyes said.

Value stream in 2020 As value stream moves into 2020, more tool vendors are going to take interest and figure out where they fit in the overall pipeline. “2020 will be the year where all these tools start to realize I have to be hooked into the overall toolchain, not from a toolchain perspective but from value stream management,” said Plutora’s Keyes.

2020 will also be the year organizations start to see more results, according to Tasktop’s Kersten.

SD Times declared 2019 was the year of the value stream as organizations started to turn their focus on how to better drive value, and a majority of the year was spent on getting through the hype and finding clarity around what value streams really were and how they are going to have an impact, HCL’s Muskoff explained.

Now that there has been more research and understanding into the space, in 2020 “confusions will begin to get unwound, and some of these practices, definitions, and the way to apply value streams will become clear. It will go from this interest and start of the hype to actual company results,” said Kersten.

These understandings will come from experimentation, and more experience with the value stream. According to ConnectALL’s Knight, most companies are not currently at a place where they are getting value stream right. There is going to be some trial and error before they get to a place where it is working, and companies will need to turn to consultants to help them improve. “What

January 2020

SD Times

Putting the value stream together There are many different components that make up the value stream process. Businesses need to be able to map their value stream, analyze it and manage it.

Value stream mapping refers to the practice of looking at all activities throughout the delivery life cycle and mapping it out, according to Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop, a software tool integration company.

“The approach we have taken with value stream management is implementing and measuring those product value streams and doing so end-to-end, making that a core part of our management model, operating model and toolchain,” he said.

Value stream management refers to the process of managing the value stream.

“Watching things flow, looking for areas to remove impediments and actually move things through and managing your value stream is a human process. Part of managing your value stream is you want to do things like value stream analysis. Value stream analysis actually includes doing a value stream map, measuring it, and looking how things flow through your system of delivery. The exercise for all that I call value stream optimization,” said Lance Knight, COO at ConnectALL. Jeff Keyes of Plutora, explained value stream management is not monitoring, it is not a feature management system, it is not a bug management system and it is not a build system.

“Value stream management sits as a way to interconnect the entire toolchain under one umbrella to basically create a framework or an ecosystem that the tools can plug into to make them all work together. It serves to interconnect disparate tools, creating scenarios from teams that don't normally talk. For instance the help desk doesn't normally talk to development directly, but using value stream management they can, should, and do,” said Keyes. “Helping bring alignment from the business to what is happening in the development world is where value stream management really brings this all together.”

—Christina Cardoza

we are going to see is value stream managers start to come to fruition a little more in particular companies. We are going to watch companies look at how their value stream grew organically and they are going to try to improve that. We are going to see a bunch of niche businesses that are keen on value stream management come out and help companies achieve better flow and deliver software quicker,” said Knight.

Also expected from value stream management over the next year is the emergence of artificial intelligence and machine learning. According to CollabNet VersionOne’s Roberston, the value stream is increasing the amount of data businesses are receiving, and they are starting to get good at assessing the value they are delivering, but the next step is to really understand what that value is. For example, when trying to optimize the backlog and decide what to work on first, an intelligent layer can be added to the backlog to understand and assign business value levels or point to work that needs to be done and creat-

ed. “Being able to utilize machine learning to help make work not only easier as far as the delivery, development and delivery aspect, but also ensuring that what is delivered is optimal for the business,” said Robertson.

HCLs’ Muskoff agreed that machine learning and artificial intelligence will be the next step in value stream. He predicts ML and AI are going to be able to go even deeper into solutions and uncover even more bottlenecks.

“We are at the stage with the technology where dashboarding and KPIs are important, but to really get to where we need to go the tool needs to tell you where to focus,” he said. Areas where he believes machine learning and AI will be applied is bottleneck detection, planning, and predictive analytics around delivery time.

“More organizations will realize this isn’t optional. This isn’t just for technology visionaries. This is survival. If you don’t know your product value streams then you have no place in the age of software,” said Kersten. z

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January 2020

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How can organizations successfully navigate the value stream with your solution?

Brian Muskoff, director of DevOps strategy at HCL Technologies, IT and digital solutions provider We believe value stream management is an everyday solution to improve collaboration, delivery flow and business results. With HCL UrbanCode Velocity, teams can immediately change the nature of their Agile + DevOps practices with our value stream visualization that we call Dots. This real-time, end-toend view enables teams to quickly answer many questions, like what are our bottlenecks, are we on track, and what should we work on next? Stand-ups, playbacks and retrospectives will take on a new, better shape.

At the portfolio level, our insights capability provides metrics focused on speed, security and quality over time.

Identify your high-performing teams, what they are doing differently, and how can you lift up lower-performing teams.

You can’t manage what you don’t measure and we make it easy by tapping into the data from your existing tools and creating relationships from end-to-end.

Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop, a software tool integration company Value streams begin and end with customers, but what happens in between is often a mystery. That’s where Tasktop comes in.

Tasktop products and services are primarily focused on flow, which is essential to value stream optimization and management. To understand value stream flow, the teams that plan, build, deliver and support software need a single source of truth into the flow of events, from the earliest stages of product ideation through production — including customer feedback. While a product life cycle seems like a continuous flow conceptually, Tasktop reveals the otherwise hidden wait-states that interfere with value delivery.

Value Stream Management is not just about delivering value faster, it’s about protecting business value by helping IT work collaboratively with the business so

they can be more responsive to the market and disruption. Tasktop helps customers navigate this with products and services that provide visibility into how business value flows across product value streams to meet business outcomes.

Using Flow Metrics, global enterprises can measure what matters (in real-time) to move to a product-centric operating model that changes perception of IT as a set of projects working as a cost center to a continuous profit generator that truly helps them transform.

Jeff Keyes, director of product marketing at value stream management platform provider Plutora Plutora offers a full-stack VSM solution for the enterprise. Its integrations alleviate the need to acquire an entire prescriptive toolchain to perform useful, actionable intelligence to software management. And Plutora is tool agnostic, providing the ability to deliver software with any tool of choice.

Plutora has built a management system for the software delivery process – appropriate for all types of development methodologies and proven at enterprise scale. This approach enables the solution to extend from agile management, discovery and design through to delivery and production. Because of that, Plutora customers benefit from how seamless the VSM platform is across the entire toolchain — all while providing them with an unmatched advantage.

Lance Knight, COO of ConnectALL, a value stream integration company We help enterprises of all sizes connect, visualize, and measure software delivery value streams. We connect, integrate, and capture data from all the tools in your software delivery value stream. Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of tools specifically in the DevOps space, including tools on the right side of your value stream: The tools that verify, package, secure, release, configure and monitor a company’s software.

In order to optimize the value stream more effectively and capture data from this explosion of tools, ConnectALL has recently announced its Universal Adapter that will connect to any solution or tool you use as part of your software delivery value stream, even the ones that haven’t been created yet!

This ability allows our customers to automate and amplify feedback loops from their DevOps tools to their agile team backlogs. The new Universal Adapter allows ConnectALL to be your value stream control center and helps manage the flow of work through your software delivery organization. ConnectALL can see a developer complete a user story in your planning tool, and at that point, ConnectALL can instruct your code verification tool to analyze the code that was just submitted to it and return details back to your planning tool of any discovered issues.

Eric Robertson, VP of product marketing and management at CollabNet VersionOne We are very unique in this space. There are other vendors that come in from different types of spaces.

You have vendors from the traditional Agile planning side, project portfolio management, traditional ARA, CD and more. But because we have merged together with VersionOne, we bring a lot of those tools and aspects together under our platform.

Together, we have the capability to do value stream mapping and value stream integration. We have a full enterprise planning and delivery toolset to help users with their enterprise planning up to the strategic teams and portfolio level, and down to when you start breaking down into features, epics and planning.

We have the capability to bring in that data from that right-hand side and map it directly to my strategic themes and objectives and key results that drive business outcomes. We can actually show you that. We can map it full end-to-end. That is our unique value proposition. z

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A guide to value stream management tools n

FEATURED PROVIDERS n

n CollabNet VersionOne is a leading platform provider for Value Stream Management, Agile planning, DevOps and source code management. Its offerings provide global enterprise and government industry leaders a cohesive solution that enables them to ideate, create and orchestrate the flow of value through continuous delivery pipelines with measurable business outcomes. n ConnectALL is a company dedicated to helping its customers achieve higher levels of agility, velocity and predictability.

Teams from software development and delivery, IT and business units across large and small enterprises worldwide use ConnectALL’s value stream integration platform to connect people, processes, and tools from multiple ALM and DevOps providers, such as Atlassian, Microfocus, Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce, BMC, ServiceNow, and more. Designed to break down barriers to continuous delivery, ConnectALL helps companies rapidly create business value by bringing software innovation to market faster and increasing productivity through cross-team collaboration. n HCL UrbanCode Velocity is a value stream management platform that integrates with all of your tools, bringing your DevOps data together once and for all. HCL UrbanCode Velocity makes multi-tool data accessible and actionable using a powerful new DevOps Query Language, and a unique “dots” view to quickly spot bottlenecks. HCL UrbanCode is part of HCL Software DevOps, a solutions group that provides enterpriselevel security, testing, and continuous delivery software. n Plutora provides value stream management solutions for enterprise IT, improving the transparency, speed and quality of software development and delivery by correlating data from across the toolchains and analyzing critical indicators of every aspect of the delivery process. Acting as the “catwalk above the factory floor”, Plutora ensures organizational alignment between software development with business strategy and provides visibility, analytics and insights into the entire value stream. This approach guides continuous improvement and digital transformation progress through the measured outcomes of each effort. Plutora ensures governance and management across the entire portfolio by orchestrating release pipelines, managing hybrid test environments, and orchestrating complex application deployments — all independent of methodology, team structure, technology, and level of automation. n Tasktop is the only Value Stream Management company that takes a strategic approach to enterprise toolchain integration — connecting the complex network of best-of-breed tools used for planning, building and delivering software at an enterprise level. The backbone of the most impactful Agile and DevOps transformations, Tasktop is an easy-to-use, scalable and reliable tool integration infrastructure that connects, visualizes and measures software delivery value streams to accelerate the time to value of their software products and services.

n CA Technologies: Disparate tools may help an individual or a team do their job, but they impede the progress of the larger organization. With tools that span the application life cycle for planning, build, test, release and putting into production, CA (now a Broadcom company) provides an end-to-end view into the processes and products that deliver value for customers and bring efficiencies to the business. n CloudBees Flow, the industry’s first unified Application Release Orchestration (ARO) platform built for DevOps at enterprise scale, helps drive IT efficiency by automating and orchestrating software releases, pipelines and deployments with the analytics and insight to measure, track and improve results. The latest update, Version 9.1 adds a series of enhancements that make it easier than ever to eliminate release anxiety across the entire software delivery chain. n GitLab is a DevOps platform built from the ground up as a single application for all stages of the DevOps lifecycle enabling Product, Design, Development, QA, Security, and Operations teams to work concurrently on the same project. GitLab provides teams a single data store, one user interface, and one permission model across the DevOps lifecycle, allowing teams to collaborate and work on a project from a single conversation.

n Intland: codeBeamer ALM is a holistically integrated Application Lifecycle Management tool that facilitates collaboration, increases transparency, and helps align software development processes with your strategic business objectives. n Jama Software centralizes upstream planning and requirements management in the software development process with its solution, Jama Connect. Product planning and engineering teams can collaborate quickly while building out traceable requirements and test cases to ensure development stays aligned to customer needs and compliance throughout the process. With integrations to task management and test automation solutions, development teams can centralize their process, mitigate risk, and have unparalleled visibility into what they’re building and why. n Micro Focus helps organizations run and transform their business through four core areas of digital transformation: enterprise DevOps, hybrid IT management, predictive analytics and security, risk and governance. Driven by customer-centric innovation, our software provides the critical tools they need to build, operate, secure, and analyze the enterprise. By design, these tools bridge the gap between existing and emerging technologies — enabling faster innovation, with less risk, in the race to digital transformation. n Panaya: Value Stream Management is about linking economic value to technical outcomes. Though not unique to the enterprise, large organizations have specific challenges and needs: siloed teams, waterfall or hybrid operational modes, as well as many nontechnical stakeholders. Panaya Release Dynamix links IT and business teams with an intuitive tool that strategically aligns demand streams with the overall business strategy. z

Bring Your DevOps Data Together Once & For All FEATURE

BUG

Long wait time

High priority

TASK

Blocker for customer

PULL REQUEST

Not linked to issue

HCL UrbanCode Velocity is a value stream management platform that integrates with all of your tools so you can visualize, orchestrate, and optimize your continuous delivery pipeline. UrbanCode Velocity makes multi-tool data accessible and actionable using a powerful new DevOps Query Language and a unique “dots” view to quickly spot bottlenecks and make better decisions.

VALUE STREAM VISUALIZATION

AUTOMATED GOVERNANCE

RELEASE ORCHESTRATION

DEVOPS INSIGHTS

Learn More

hclsw.co/getvelocity UrbanCode is a trademark of IBM Corporation, registered in many jurisdictions, and is used under license.