The The idea of improving the creation and delivery of value to users and the organization itself has come to be described by a number of terms in the industry: value stream management, developer productivity and visibility, stream management and – at Broadcom, ValueOps (its value stream management solution).
Despite the wrangling over terminology, the industry seems to agree that the concept of value delivery has three generally agreed stages: visibility; alignment of strategy, planning and work; and optimizing efficiency. In this article, we will focus on increasing visibility.
The desired business outcomes are to improve decision-making, improve confidence in data and minimize risk.
In Broadcom’s January research report on global trends in value stream management, one of the biggest challenges organizations face in implementing digital transformation and delivering value was a lack of enterprise-wide data visibility, which hindered efforts to make business decisions that maximize value.
Laureen Knudsen, chief transformation officer at Broadcom, said: “I think people are now realizing that their original view of digital transformation, where they just wanted to automate parts of the process, is not good enough. If you can’t see how work flows through your organization, or if data or processes still live in silos, you won’t have a realistic picture of where your organization is.” Knudsen went on to say that the key to success lies in integrating and connecting all these pieces with reliable data.
What ValueOps does for customers is enable them to define, model, measure, prioritize and fund the initiatives they value most. Accurately models complex business operations and scenarios to enable correct definition and tracking of value. Organizationally, this helps organizations go beyond projects to include business value streams and product portfolios.
Another problem organizations say they have is that stakeholders don’t trust data from other teams and that these silos create friction between different teams and roles. ValueOps brings together metrics from disparate systems to create a single source of truth and connects this development data to the definition of value, enabling real-time measurement of value creation and ROI. Once generated, each stakeholder in the process can get the insights that are most relevant to them.
Ultimately, ValueOps can minimize risk by synchronizing business goals and funding with ongoing development and delivery efforts, allowing the solution to flag risk and dependencies whenever change occurs. All of this enables organizations to turn around faster as they have access to reliable, real-time data, which eliminates silos in the pipeline and allows delays and bottlenecks to be quickly identified.
“We give organizations the ability to align their teams and gain insight into every part of the delivery lifecycle, from ideation to customer value,” said Knudsen. “Did customers like what we did and were we able to quickly generate value for them? Our solutions automate processes and provide insight into all this data, up and down the organization.”
“This type of strategy can work well for your organization, allowing managers to have the dashboards they need to make good decisions about priorities. It’s much easier for companies to understand what’s going on, so they can optimize any part of the product lifecycle that isn’t performing well.”
So what used to be called engineering efficiency, developer visibility, or other buzzwords is now converging into value stream management—a comprehensive practice that organizations are quickly learning is the key solution to delivering on that promise of delivering greater customer value.
This article was created by SD Times and Broadcom Software