Writing this year’s report with Eveline Oehrlich was a surprisingly emotional experience. I found myself struggling with one of my most distinct character traits—my impatience. It’s a standing joke with those humans with whom I have close relationships that I have almost zero reserves of patience—a personality facet that I have been known to defend on the basis that it’s what helps me get sh*t done.
But while we were crunching the data and filtering for insights, my brain was kinda desperate to find more trends. Eveline, as ever, is fantastic to work with and, when I shared how I was feeling with her, pointed out that this is only the second year of the report—the first where we would find any trends at all—and while some of the data dismayed me, there were also plenty of green shoots pointing towards blooming roses in the future.
Before I share more about the good, the bad, and the ugly, let me explain why my emotions were running so high at work and this particular research. My path into Value Stream Management has been via DevOps—one of the things I find most joyful about working in the Value Stream Management Consortium community is how many different paths people walk down to join us here—agile at scale, lean, manufacturing—it’s widened my network and my eyes enormously. But it was my frustrations with DevOps adoption that led to my Value Stream Management epiphany:
My epiphany happened in the summer of 2019 and I realized that Value Stream Management was what I’d been looking for—it was going to unlock the promise of DevOps. Value Stream Management has been around for a long time, but it’s only very recently that it’s had this new renaissance. This resurgence is all to do with digital—and all to do with the twelve years the industry has spent investing into DevOps practices and, very importantly, toolchains. Because DevOps toolchains are now fairly widespread they enable us to:
But a DevOps toolchain can’t do it on its own—not without a lot of heavy lifting from the development and/or platform teams. There is good news in that the vendor landscape for Value Stream Management solutions is burgeoning—and a little bit of bad. As Forrester’s Chris Condo put it in his blog post, The State of VSM: Five Things We Like, alongside the launch of Forrester’s latest VSM research report, The Value Stream Management Landscape, Q3 2022:
The analysts tend to focus on the vendor landscape, which is super-useful for buyers no doubt, but there’s a little more going on when organizations adopt Value Stream Management ways of working. As we describe here in The Value Stream Management Implementation Roadmap, there are a few steps on this journey—in fact, we arranged our report on the State of Value Stream Management this year according to these steps. It’s been shown it’s possible to implement tooling ahead of mapping, even organizing, around value streams but many organizations still want to get these foundations in place—and our research shows that mapping is still the most common entry point into VSM. It’s simply much better known right now that the wider set of management practices.
So, onto the good, the bad, and the downright ugly discoveries in this year’s report:
In summary, as we put it in our report—Value Stream Management is crossing the chasm. We’ll be exploring this in detail at Flowtopia on October 17 in Las Vegas, our inaugural, flagship, in-person event with speakers living through VSM adoption journeys right now.
Those green shoots are showing us how the roses are blooming, my impatience is not sated—I can’t wait to see what news the 2023 report brings. If you want to participate in the making of the 2023 report and join the VSMC community, become a member below!