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Value Stream
Management
CONTENTS

∙ How Does VSM Work?

∙ What Problems Does VSM Solve?

Essentials
∙ Fundamentals of VSM

∙ Key Concepts and Features

∙ Conclusion

BRYANT SCHUCK
PRODUCT MANAGER, HCL ACCELERATE

STEVE BOONE
HEAD OF PRODUCT MANAGEMENT, HCL SOFTWARE DEVOPS

Value Stream Management (VSM) is the lean practice of monitoring,
evaluating, and continually improving an organization’s software
delivery process. VSM, when appropriately scaled, can help an
organization in a variety of ways. From improved collaboration
and communication across the entire software delivery cycle to
actionable insights and metrics backed by real-time data flowing
through an organization, there are many benefits for organizations
to look at their own processes on an ongoing (and hopefully
HOW DOES VSM WORK?
One of the main goals of value stream management is to measure
and improve the software development lifecycle. For this, we need
to shift the conversation from only being about agile or DevOps to a
more comprehensive dialogue — one that spans from a business idea,
all the way to a customer deliverable.
Many organizations will start their VSM journey with an honest

automated) basis:
• Development teams can get instant feedback on their day-
to-day processes, helping them to identify and understand
bottlenecks as they occur.
• Product managers can accurately communicate to the rest
of the business and their customers about delivery dates,
helping them better manage expectations.
conversation about their current end-to-end processes. Teams will
discuss everything from how ideas (business value) are created
and tracked, to how they are designed, architected, and eventually
selected for development, all the way through the build, deploy, test,
and release processes.

• Release engineers can start to shift governance concerns

left, helping to identify risk, minimize rework, and improve
quality.

• Executives can help ensure that engineering activities are in

alignment with business goals.

VSM is about seeing more by making work visible, identifying

best practices, and succeeding faster as a development team and
organization. VSM is not a new concept, but in this digital world, VSM
has proven itself an essential everyday tool to help ensure a high-
performing DevOps organization.

1
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Oftentimes, this will take place over a series of days in a process
commonly referred to as “value stream mapping.”
The goal of value stream mapping is to come up with a diagram that
accurately depicts the current stages of software delivery within an
organization and is a critical first step in being able to manage the
value stream. Many organizations go through this process once or
twice a year, but that simply is not often enough.
Change is constant, and if we want to be sure we are working at
optimal efficiency, we need to be able to track our value stream in
real time. How does that work? In all honesty, it’s not an easy problem
to solve.
Effective value stream management requires aggregating data from
all the development tools that your organization uses on a regular
basis to deliver software.
Examples of the types of data most commonly collected are:
• Commit information from your source control tool
• Build information from your continuous integration server
• Any and all testing data that might be run as part of a build
(unit testing, code coverage, static analysis, security scans,
etc.)
• Deployment information to all environments
• Any automated testing data performed post-deployment
Being able to collect this data is key because it is essential to building
and establishing relationships between how these tools fit together
and how they drive value through an organization.
Ideally, teams will start to build a set of APIs that allow them to
associate code changes to change requests, and subsequently tie
those change requests to builds, test results, deployments, and
every other activity that takes place as part of the software delivery
lifecycle.
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WHAT PROBLEMS DOES VSM SOLVE?
VSM helps improve the three DevOps pillars of people, processes,
and technology.
THE PEOPLE PROBLEM
Now more than ever, teams are working remotely and having a
harder time collaborating in a fast-paced development environment.
The lack of face-to-face conversation makes “water cooler”
conversations a thing of the past. Standup meetings and
retrospectives often suffer because it’s not obvious how the team is
functioning as a whole. It is difficult to know which team member is
responsible for certain tasks, and even harder to know when those
tasks have fallen behind.
VSM FOR THE PEOPLE
By tracking work in progress, VSM helps make the work visible,
which creates a shared responsibility for the software produced and
increased transparency, communication, and collaboration across
development, IT/operations, and business teams.
VSM, in many ways, starts to humanize DevOps, by creating
meaningful dialogue around current processes and encouraging a
DevOps culture that embraces thinking outside of the box to solve
traditional problems.
By adding visibility, teams obtain knowledge about everything
that is required for an organization to deliver high quality software,
and therefore tend to have more empathy for their coworkers.
Visibility into how value is produced allows everyone from top-level
executives to developers to look at the same data and have much
more direct and transparent conversations.
When these groups are aligned, conversations become easier
because expectations are set with data-driven analysis rather
than feelings. When teams do not fully understand each other’s
responsibilities, this can cause a number of issues that ultimately
delay throughput and can result in finger-pointing. Value stream
management can revolutionize a company's culture by refocusing
efforts where needed and identifying and eliminating waste.
THE PROCESS PROBLEM
When discussing processes, we tend to focus on how efficient we can
make a particular workflow. This requires organizations to constantly
reevaluate how they operate to identify new bottlenecks and
develop a leaner alternative.
Part of the luxury that comes with having a responsive, highly agile
development organization is having to constantly juggle the requests
of the business, customers, and their own teams.

At the end of the day, this leaves many with a million-and-one things
that stakeholders would like to see done, and probably only 20-to-30
that can get done during any given sprint.
Over the years, teams have used a number of methodologies to try
to get better at tracking, planning, and managing work in progress
(WIP). From Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming, to Adaptive,
Dynamic, and Lean Software Development, each approach takes a
different twist on the same challenge – being flexible while still being
predictable.
VSM FOR PROCESSES
VSM helps teams across the business better understand what can
be delivered and when. This is critical from a tracking and planning
standpoint. It is crucial to understand what on-time delivery
impediments exist and the best way to remove them. Understanding
how work flows into and out of a particular segment of your value
stream can help you identify the types of bottlenecks you may have.
For example, does work flow into and out of a segment in large
batches instead of flowing in and out continuously? From a tracking
and planning perspective, knowing exactly what a development
team can deliver — and when — makes it considerably easier to
communicate to the business and your clients with confidence.
Being able to pinpoint specific epics, features, and stories, and
identify where they are in the development process is a huge first
step to better predictability.
THE TECHNOLOGY PROBLEM
Technology is always changing, and with that change comes
uncertainty. Recently, organizations have had to weigh the risk, cost,
and value of modernizing their applications into microservices. How
do we know if it is worth the engineering investment?
Other challenges in technology are around security and quality. Are
our teams taking the necessary steps to ensure they are developing
software without vulnerabilities? Are they adhering to our quality
standards?
Security and quality initiatives always have good intentions but
typically wither on the vine without constant monitoring to know
when teams have regressed.
VSM FOR TECHNOLOGY
VSM allows for unprecedented business agility. It provides insights
into everything from high-performing teams, the effects of
unplanned work, lead times, cycle times, and other key performance
indicators that businesses use to determine efficiency.
With the right visibility, it is easy to identify which teams are
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following quality and security best practices. Organizations that
excel in VSM can start to manage critical business factors such as risk,
revenue, and cost.
By tracking and visualizing a team’s quality and security efforts,
companies can identify risk earlier in the development process.
This allows teams to minimize the amount of rework that takes
places, which can help keep costs down. The overall efficiency of the
improved value stream will result in a fast speed-to-market, which
has a direct correlation to revenue.
In the digital transformation age, business agility is necessary
for growth and survival. It's not only about velocity anymore —
companies need to deliver with speed and quality. To do this, you
need to have meaningful conversations about trade-offs and an
understanding that we only want to deliver faster software while
preventing negative affects to the overall quality of the product.
FUNDAMENTALS OF VSM
CREATING A VALUE STREAM MAP
The first step in better managing a value stream is to plot out
precisely how work on a day-to-day basis gets done. This should take
into consideration all of the curveballs that often get thrown into a
given sprint or release.
A team can usually plot out their value stream relatively quickly
as they are the ones primarily doing the work daily. However, this
first attempt is usually very development-focused. It may not
directly express how teams communicate their work or unspoken
dependencies they may have with other teams.
Once you have successfully mapped your value stream, the next
hurdle is optimizing your value stream. Organic conversation is the
best place to start. In keeping with the spirit of Agile, it is important
that your development teams are having a regular retrospective to
discuss what they feel they can improve.
Even more important is having a culture where the team feels they
are responsible for owning any corrective actions they feel should be
taken to improve the efficiency in which they operate.

Require teams to discuss the work they are delivering in relation
to the value stream. Many teams will keep a printed or white board
representation of their value stream in their retrospective room.
This allows teams to discuss precisely where they think bottlenecks
occur. If a particular story caused problems during an iteration, it’s
important to understand the cause of the problems. Where did it get
held up? Could we have planned better for this situation?
Common reasons that work doesn’t get completed are:
• The team was impacted by unplanned work (support, exces-
sive meetings, etc.).
• The work was dependent on input or contributions from
another team and it didn’t get done (design, QA, other devel-
opment teams).
• The team was waiting on feedback from a customer before
finalizing the implementation.
• The work was held up in code review.
• There was too much WIP (work-in-progress) and the team
couldn’t contain the story.
The feedback gained from these conversations can help teams
that have not automated the management of their value streams
immensely.
KEY CONCEPTS AND FEATURES
When implementing value stream management, there are a few
concepts that are fundamental for a successful implementation.
1. Value Stream Mapping: The act of mapping out all steps in
the software delivery lifecycle. Each stage represents a transi-
tion of business value.
2. Bottleneck Detection: The process of identifying where
business value stalls within your value stream. To maximize
flow through the process, you want to remove the worst
bottlenecks. A good way to get started is to analyze the length
of time it takes for a work item (story, change request, etc.) to
move from one state to another (for example, how long it takes
for a story to move from in-progress to complete).
3. Accelerate Metrics: These metrics focus on business agility,
specifically:
• Lead time: The time required for a work item to go from
an accepted (backlog) to value realization (the customer).
This includes both engineering time and non-value-add-
ed waiting time between sub-processes.
• Cycle Time: This is similar to lead time, except cycle time
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is measured from when the development team begins
work to when that work reaches the customer.
• Load: The numbers of work items active or waiting in a
value stream at a given time. Load measures utilization
capabilities of value streams related to productivity in the
process flow.
• Throughput: The rate of work items completed during a
period of time. Improving throughput can result in better
responsiveness to customer requirements and may yield
lead time reductions for value streams.
• Work Item Distribution: The proportion of different types
of work items over time. This provides teams visibility
into the type of work being completed (features, defects,
tasks, etc.)
• Wait Time: An estimate of time that work items spend idle
(in a non-productive state) during its journey through the
value stream.
4. Advanced Metrics: Broader insights into the full value stream
that focus less on traditional KPI’s and are more focused on
quality, security, and governance.
• Security: Identifying which teams are adhering to security
best practices and trending these results over time.
• Build Frequency: The amount of builds per time period by
application. This allows the business to see the frequen-
cy of continuous integration and, therefore, the faster
integration of value.
• Deploy Frequency: The amount of deployments per time
period by application and environment.
• QA Metrics: Analysis around the quality of your software.
This allows the business to know which teams are testing
frequently, and to trend those results over time.
CONCLUSION
Using a value stream management approach, teams can make
their software delivery practices smarter. Instead of relying on one
tool to provide insights into the delivery process, you can now
leverage the data across all of your meaningful systems to get a true
understanding of how work moves through your organization.
When you are using a data-driven approach, it also allows teams
to have visibility into how the whole process fits together. By
aggregating this data into a value stream, we have created a single
source of truth for where work is, and a chain of custody to show how
it has made its way through the value stream. This can completely
change the dynamic of meeting from reactive to proactive.
 REFCARD | VALUE STREAM MANAGEMENT ESSENTIALS

Instead of a meeting focused on determining where features are or how That is why it is value stream management is not just an instrument
much longer they might have until completion, meetings can now focus for management, but instead considered a best practice for everyone
on outcomes and removing potential blockers. — from leadership to developers.

When everyone is looking at the same data and the same metrics,
something magical happens: The cultural differences between your
engineering teams and your business are no longer separated, but
instead, everyone is aligned on producing and delivering value.

WRITTEN BY BRYANT SCHUCK, WRITTEN BY STEVE BOONE,

PRODUCT MANAGER, HCL ACCELERATE
Bryant Schuck is the Product Manager for HCL
Accelerate, HCL Software DevOps’ value stream
management platform. Bryant has spent most of his career
focused on improving software development from the ground
floor, and is an expert in back-end web/mobile architecture,
API’s, and Scrum. Bryant has several years of experience in
software and agile ranging from small startups to Fortune 500
companies.
HEAD OF PRODUCT MANAGEMENT, HCL SOFTWARE
DEVOPS
Steve Boone is the Head of Product Management
for HCL Software DevOps. For more than a decade,
Steve has helped hundreds of companies adopt agile best
practices and strategies for DevOps. He speaks regularly
at industry events on the topic of DevOps transformation,
Continuous Delivery best practices, Agile adoption, and Value
Stream Management

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