Among enterprise leaders, the adoption of Value Stream Management (VSM) has rapidly emerged as a key strategic priority. Through VSM, businesses can realize a number of benefits, but most critically, VSM can help organizations be better positioned to advance their digital transformation initiatives.
Given the rapid move of many teams to VSM, it’s no surprise a lot is being said and written about the framework. While VSM is a mature concept, there are still a lot of misperceptions on the approach, particularly when it comes to getting started and building a VSM discipline within an enterprise. In this post, we’ll dispel four of the most common misperceptions we’re hearing people still have when it comes to VSM.
In recent years, many DevOps teams were early adopters of VSM. This makes sense: VSM can be a logical and integral part of the larger move to embrace and expand upon agile and DevOps approaches. However, while DevOps may often be where VSM starts, that’s not where it ends.
Ultimately, it is when value streams are managed in a true end-to-end fashion, from strategic planning to customer feedback, that organizations realize the true potential of VSM. This requires the participation, not only of DevOps, but teams from strategic planning, marketing, sales, customer service, and more.
The reality is that to truly embrace VSM, organizational alignment is required. However, you can start slowly with one value stream and continue evolving your organization. This requires a couple of key changes:
While VSM does require some fundamental change, that doesn’t mean scrapping everything and starting over. VSM ultimately requires the effective mobilization of people, process, and technology, but you can take an evolutionary approach for each of these aspects:
As outlined above, teams can move to VSM in an evolutionary fashion. While agile practices are required for VSM, they can also be adopted in a gradual fashion. In other words, you don’t need to have completely established agile practices before you can start with VSM.
The promise of VSM is enormous. Don’t let myths and misconceptions stymie your team’s ability to capitalize on the opportunity. The reality is that, while VSM requires some fundamental changes, teams can, and have, made this move successfully.
To gain a greater understanding of the VSM journey teams are on, Broadcom commissioned a survey of hundreds of business and IT executives. The results offer a number of compelling insights into why and how leaders are moving to VSM. See the report, “2022 Value Stream Management Predictions” for complete details.
If you want to continue the conversation and join me and hundreds of others as Value Stream Management Consortium members, head over here.