Value Stream Management
The most successful physical businesses have excelled at Value Stream Management (VSM) for decades,
but its principles and practices are now powering the most successful digital transformations and high performing
software delivery.
VSM is the foundation for continually optimizing flow and value realization by providing holistic, actionable insight
into value, waste, quality, and velocity across any enterprise. VSM provides the missing link to connect cost and
revenue, development and operations, business and tech. Excelling at VSM enables optimal organizational performance,
and effective assessment is the cornerstone progress.
Created by:
Steve Pereira
VSM Consortium
Author highlights
Value Stream Management Will Define the Future of DevOps
Value Stream Management is a field that encompasses a number of practices and techniques to organize, map, measure, manage, improve, govern, and accelerate the flow of measurable outcomes to the customer. It makes work visible and in doing so surfaces insights into where delays, waste, and non-value adding work can be removed in order to improve customer experience.
Gartner 2020
Map Your Path to Value
Navigate Value Stream Management
1. Start
Get going from wherever you are.
2. Vision
Set your long-term vision and goals.
3. Identify
Identify your value streams—anything that delivers a product or service. You're aiming to accelerate the flow of value to the customer.
4. Organize
Find the people accountable for every step in each value stream.
5. Map
Bring the players in your value stream together for a mapping exercise. Find where the idea starts, and track every step until the value is delivered.
6. Connect
Connect the parts of your DevOps toolchain aligned to the steps in your value stream map and start getting real-time data and insights into your value stream flow.
7. Inspect
You're automated your value stream map, now use it! Set goals for your value stream and use retrospectives to determine where you are.
8. Adapt
Use your insights to design and perform experiments that adapt and optimize your flow so you can continually delight your customers.
Sample Questions
Starting Point
Our team regularly reviews the metrics around flow, throughput, WiP, and delivery.
Vision
We have identified our key drivers/pains for Value Stream Management (VMS).
Leadership
Our leadership is more focused on long-term outcomes than short-term outcomes.
Identification
We have defined the types of work our value stream has to manage.
Organization
Our teams are organized around products, not projects.
Mapping
We have an experienced and engaging mapping facilitator available.
Connection
We can trace work from start to finish in our value stream using data from our tools.
Adaptation
We use metrics to measure the efficiency of our value stream and continually improve and adapt.
Next Steps
We have a clear understanding of how to improve value stream performance.
Top Features
Leverage proven, peer-reviewed research to quickly identify where your organization needs attention and initiate informed intervention.
Adopt a common language around flow, value, measurement, and holistic performance that enables powerful progress.
Gain insights into hidden gaps and validation of assumptions—perform analysis at the team, program, and organizational levels.
Benchmark Value Stream Management adoption across your teams and organization against other organizations in your industry.
Steve Pereira
VSMC Board Advisor
Steve Pereira is a board advisor to the VSM Consortium, CEO of Visible Value Stream Consulting,
co-creator of the VSM Foundation Course, and an upcoming book on VSM.
He's been an active facilitator through his DevOps Toronto community since 2010. He co-created a community for
Flow and Value Stream Management in 2019, and later joined the VSMC as an advisor and contributor where he
strives to make VSM easier to adopt, implement, and scale.
For the past 20 years, his focus has been on using collaborative mapping techniques to guide ambitious and
struggling teams towards their true north. He's a former startup CTO, agency consultant, systems and release engineer,
finance IT manager, tech support phone jockey, and pizza maker. He remains obsessed with the flow of work across organizations.
Steve Pereira can be reached by clicking here.
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