Corporate giants like Uber, Tesla, and Netflix have proved that the future is going to be an amazing place to be in. They radically disrupted the entire industry in which they operated. Leveraging 'software,’' these behemoths created amazing experiences for their customers. IT leaders are aware of the fact that software that is robust and of better quality can help them deliver amazing digital experiences. To do that, DevOps has become paramount to developing high-quality software as it can help you improve continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous testing, continuous monitoring, and continuous feedback. Value stream mapping can assist you as you need metrics for continuous feedback.

Exploring Value Stream Management in Detail

Software delivery is getting more challenging every day while becoming one of the critical success factors. This makes it difficult for organizations to maintain high performance and an edge in the market. To effectively manage value streams, organizations need to get proper visibility and control of various interconnected value streams across the portfolio. Moreover, modern CIOs are responsible for yielding more business value with a few resources. As a result, it isn't easy to align business goals with IT work, fast-track software delivery processes, and accelerate quality. This is where the role of value stream management comes in. 

Value streams incorporate everything in the SDLC, from ideation to production, that is required to deliver products or services to customers. It is designed to put an end to operational silos. Instead, it develops effective connections across the major teams, tools, and processes to deliver a top-notch quality product. As a result, we can say that it can effectively drive efficiency in software delivery. Like what we saw above, value stream management allows software development organizations to effectively and efficiently transform ideas into customer value. 

Your organization can begin to witness benefits as soon as you execute a value stream management approach. You can:

• Set more realistic goals. 
• Address business constraints better.
• Identify and eliminate waste.
• Get rid of bottlenecks and silos. 
• Achieve visibility, traceability, and transparency.
• Fast-track software delivery. 
• Leverage real-time metrics.
• Improve product quality. 
• Emphasize results and KPIs.
• Coordinate and automate workflows.
• Understand opportunities for automation.
• Bring tremendous business value. 
• Embed governance into SDLC.
• Foster cross-functional collaboration.
• Connect multiple processes, teams, and tools.
• Lay a foundation for a long-term improvement plan.
• Streamline communication between business and IT.

Not just that, with value stream management:

• Executives can make data-driven investments to enrich customer experience.
• Product managers can take strategic and optimized decisions.
• Release managers can constantly monitor the existing state of the product releases.
• Test environment managers can gain insights to improve cost efficiency.
• Dev managers can get more transparency in the development processes.

How Does VSM Maximize the Output of DevOps?

DevOps teams can utilize value stream management to effectively identify bottlenecks and pain points, manage errors, infuse visibility across the entire cycle, remove redundant processes, boost cross-functional collaboration, identify opportunities for automation, and more. A software value stream includes every task, right from idea to production, to help you deliver products or services to your clients. 

It can enable your business to deliver superior-quality software at a robust pace while minimizing risk. It maximizes value from customer request to delivery and enables you to improve time-to-market, enhance throughput, and optimize business outcomes. You can develop your own data-driven stream by mapping out your as-is DevOps stream, identifying waste, building your to-be DevOps stream, and communicating change to your organization.

Conclusion

To conclude, value stream management is basically a shift in the mindset. Value stream mapping is the first step to getting better visibility into your pipeline, and it is the key to making that visibility lead to change. It will be a lot easier for you to make strategic decisions when every concerned stakeholder has access to the same data. With that, organizations are managing their transformations as it is the first step to injecting better visibility into your pipeline and is the first stop to DevOps success. As a matter of fact, it can also be considered the next evolution in DevOps.