Today, every business requires the assistance of different software. Thus the quality of innovation and delivery directly affects how much money is made. Businesses need to provide an excellent digital experience, stay current with technology, and deliver value quickly enough to satisfy customers. It shall do all of this while having zero tolerance for downtime or security breaches.
Therefore, value stream management can be used to address this. Value stream management (VSM) is a shift in development philosophy that prioritizes the needs of the customer. Teams are able to assess and enhance the software delivery and value flow to consumers using VSM.
The entire development process is described, from ideation to realization of customer value. The emphasis is no longer on features and functionality. Instead, organizations ensure that the efforts and resources engaged to give value to customers will enhance flows. This as a result will produce bottlenecks, streamlining the cycle and shortening the time to market.
What exactly is value stream mapping, and why is it used?
Rather than delving straight into VSM technique. One should know that value stream mapping is a flowchart method used to explain, analyze, and improve the steps required to offer a product or service to a customer. Particularly in complex contexts.
The stream shows both task and information flows, which are mapped as either adding or subtracting value from the perspective of the consumer.
The advantages of VSM stem from Lean principles for identifying and eliminating waste. The principles are actually highly useful in more areas than assembly lines, including as IT and operations efforts, despite the fact that it has traditionally been employed in manufacturing.
VSM in DevOps: Why Use It?
DevOps is a culture in which everyone is accountable for continuous delivery, from planning and software development life cycles (SDLC) to production monitoring and continuous improvement. Essentially, it is a continuous, cross-functional strategy based on Agile and Lean principles.
Value streams are a graphical tool that enables firms to objectively assess and track what is most important to them and what they believe will ultimately provide value to customers.
Here is a partial list of reasons why your DevOps teams should use VSM:
- Aids in the identification of bottlenecks and pain spots
- Controls problems and flaws such as bugs.
- increases transparency and traceability across the whole cycle
- reduces inefficient and unnecessary processes
- Encourages cross-functional collaboration and reveals automation potential
- Faster, more integrated feedback that provides context and process clarity
- outcomes and key performance indicators
How to Implement VSM in DevOps
VSM and lean approaches are targeted to specific actions in a DevOps environment, such as shifting work across teams and providing tangible deliverables and incident reports.
A visual representation of how IT and business design, launch, and manage workflows is known as DevOps VSM. It should start with the SDLC and work its way through quality assurance, release, and operations.
Your start and conclusion points, from product development through deployment and beyond, should be clearly defined in the stream. Create your diagram with essential metrics to identify how you define and measure success so you can iterate and improve continuously.
Lean and Six Sigma methodologies advise measuring factors like lead time and value-added time. The precise metrics you utilize and the methodology you employ in a DevOps environment, naturally differ from those employed in more conventional settings.
You can, however, employ the suggested metrics if they are suited to your specific domain. Here is a brief summary of the three essential elements:
Value Added (VA)
The amount of time that a team really spends working on the project is referred to as value-added time (as opposed to, for example, the time that a project or request sits in the queue). Non-value added time occurs when there is no change in the product.
Lead Time
Lead time is the overall amount of time it takes a person or team to perform a task, including both value added and non-value added time.
% Complete/Accurate
This is the proportion of information-based work that is finished and accurate the first time and does not require rework by downstream processes. You can now start the project. By doing the following four things, you can create your own data-driven stream:
- Create a map of your current DevOps flow.
- Create your future DevOps stream by identifying waste.
- Change must be communicated to your organization.
To get started, you may utilize the Lucidchart platform to build, evaluate, and share your work at all levels with developers, QA, and stakeholders for a better overall understanding. Utilize the Lucidchart Slack connector to quickly message DevOps channels or people. For efficient DevOps solutions you can check out Fineshift.