Case Story: Defense Unicorns

Defense Unicorns is a company that delivers software platforms primarily to the U.S. Department of Defense. Bryan Finster, a distinguished engineer at Defense Unicorns, advocates for VSM as a promising approach to prioritize business value within software development. He emphasizes the importance of Value Stream Management (VSM) in achieving continuous software delivery and maximizing business value.

Finster's experience at Walmart, where his team aimed to transition from quarterly to bi-weekly delivery of their warehouse management system (WMS), highlights Defense Unicorns' focus on continuous delivery. The team's ambition to achieve daily delivery of the WMS underscores their commitment to frequent and rapid value delivery.

Defense Unicorns stresses that delivering value necessitates a focus on business issues, including the organization's mission, objectives, and the capabilities being delivered. They advocate for defining value streams and products as a crucial step in the VSM process. In their approach, they decompose value streams into business capabilities, ensuring that each capability can be described concisely.

Defense Unicorns implemented hypothesis-driven development, where they predicted outcomes based on their actions and then verified the actual results. This aligns with the principles of continuous delivery, where outcomes are continuously validated. They promote a unified approach between IT and the business, where both teams share ownership of the product, the problem, and the outcomes. This collaboration enables frequent deliveries and rapid feedback loops, fostering agility. Finster draws a parallel between this unified team concept and Amazon's approach, where each team operates as a business with profit and loss (P&L) responsibilities, emphasizing the importance of demonstrating the value contributed to business goals. He also connects VSM to DevOps, viewing it as the application of the Toyota Production System model to DevOps continuous delivery.

Defense Unicorns values the lean best practices of Toyota value stream mapping as the foundation of VSM. They utilize tools and techniques to visualize the flow of work, identify wait times, address quality issues, and reduce reject rates. They also address the importance of reward systems in VSM, arguing that people should be rewarded for the value they create rather than simply building new features.

Defense Unicorns champions VSM as a means to eliminate waste, facilitate continuous value delivery, and foster collaboration between IT and the business.