3 Bottlenecks Holding Your Value Stream Management Back

By Laksh Ranganathan, Senior Flow Advisor, Tasktop

If you’re looking to improve the time-to-market and customer responsiveness of your software portfolio, you must first establish a baseline of how fast you’re currently delivering customer value. 

True to the principles of Value Stream Management, you must look to measure the flow of value from ideation to operation -- only then can you begin identifying the wait states and impediments slowing you down. 

Yet while most organizations resonate with this theory, it’s much harder in practice. How do you obtain a single view of flow when your value stream networks contain multiple tools, teams, workflows, frameworks, and methodologies? How do you measure a single flow of value when multiple measurements of flow exist across key stages of the process?

The answer is to focus on the flow of work that exists in your IT toolchain to overcome three key bottlenecks preventing you from measuring and managing software delivery value streams to accelerate value delivery.

#1 Data Fragmentation Through Multiple Tools

In lieu of one tool capable of handling all the complexity of the enterprise software delivery process, there are fantastic tools in each area of the value stream across the ideate, create, release, and operate stages. Yet these tools are not connected and constantly change. 

There are many reasons for this. For example, you may have implemented the latest tools, an M&A disrupted how your team works with unfamiliar, inherited tools, multiple instances of one tool exist across different parts of your organization or there are different tools per value steam. On top of this, you may use many traditional tools like Excel, PowerPoint, and email to manage work. This makes collecting all that mutating data into one source of truth an onerous and difficult undertaking. 

While tool consolidation through vendor tool suites can be a solution for smaller organizations, it’s not as simple for medium to large organizations due to dynamics like location, culture, type of work, legacy tooling, and so on. A single stack may also starve teams of the best-of-breed tools that help do the work efficiently for their value streams and slow their progress. 

Solution #1 - Unify Your Teams And Tools

Integration helps embrace a varied tool landscape. Teams can work in their tools of choice and use third-party integrators to connect toolchains. They can worry about their work and leave the integration infrastructure to automate flow between systems. Enterprise architecture teams, meanwhile, can advise on whether a new tool can be integrated or embedded in the existing tool landscape to keep the infrastructure measurable end-to-end, and—crucially—ensure it’s conducive for product modeling (more on that later).

#2 Different Work States Through Multiple Workflows

Getting a sense of wait times is crucial to measuring flow efficiency to shed light on bottlenecks. Yet different tools track work and define wait states differently. “In UAT”, for instance, could include both active and wait times for some teams but not for others, preventing a consensus of the actual wait state of work and flow efficiency.

Another common impediment is the lack of psychological safety to flag work as “waiting” on another team, group, or the business. The latter is particularly tough as it may be construed as passing the buck. Consequently, extracting overall wait time, from request to delivery, and identifying bottlenecks, is near impossible.

Some small organizations are finding success by adopting a standard workflow by setting up common status rules, a common estimation model, and definition of “done”. However, this approach is difficult to sustain. Growing, evolving teams makes uniformity hard to maintain, and it can shackle team freedom. Beware also of “shadow IT,” where IT tools and processes are developed out of the approved process, making it even harder to see and measure overall flow.

Solution #2 Establish Flow States

Considering the dangers of workflow standardization, organizations shouldn’t fear to embrace variability. As contrary as it sounds, the variability fosters efficiency as it gives teams the autonomy and freedom to adapt workflows to their work -- and with work stored in tools, keeps the flow of work visible and measurable. Ideally, you want to provide teams with the freedom to develop their workflows and abstract out the details from tools to elevate them to metrics at the business level. 

Concepts described in Dr. Mik Kersten’s  The Flow Framework™ provide a way around this, where flow states are abstracted out to just four levels:

• New
• Active
• Wait
• Done

These overarching flow states sit on top of the individual statuses teams use, providing a unified way of measuring value across the portfolio. This is more robust as it allows for easier changes at a team level and -- most importantly -- the metrics don’t get in the way of productivity.

#3 Multiple Frameworks, Multiple Measurements

As teams experiment with the best ways to accelerate delivery of value, it can add even more variability in the way different parts of the organization track their work. Different measurements of flow from methodologies like SAFe and ITIL makes the traceability of work from end-to-end difficult. For instance, a common pattern identified is “Water-Scrum-Fall,” where Development is using Agile and DevOps practices, but further upstream (PPM) and further downstream (Deployment and Operations) are using more waterfall-based methods.

While team-level metrics are critical for improving team efficiency, these metrics are too granular for the business. The insights needed at a business-level are far more overarching but the inability to abstract the details out of the various parts of the value stream impedes the ability to generate them and make them relevant and meaningful to business leaders.

Solution #3 Flow Item Modeling

One way to work around the variability in the way work is organized and worked upon by various teams is to abstract out the details and elevate them to groups of work that are relevant to the business. The Flow Framework provides an easy way to do this by broadly categorizing all work into four flow items to enable end-to-end measurement without impacting framework interpretations:

• Features (business value)
• Defects (quality)
• Risk (security and compliance)
• Debt (impediments to future delivery)

Measure Flow Based On Current State

Metrics must not dictate organizational processes and the way teams collaborate to create value. Instead measure flow based on the current state, using integration and modeling techniques like flow item and flow state models, which ensure you can measure flow of value across the entire organization and view flow through a common lens despite all the variability that exists. These models overlay on the existing ways of working in a non-intrusive way allowing teams to work in a way that best suits their context --- while giving the business vital metrics that can drive IT decisions that deliver business outcomes.

About The Author

Laksh Ranganathan is Senior Flow Advisor at Tasktop.