What happens in the first 6 months of using value stream management?
When you start using a value stream management tool, you can reap immediate benefits like gaining a single source of truth to see all your DevOps pipeline metrics in one place. We went over these out-of-the-gate benefits in our last blog post, but how do you keep the momentum going? Value stream management is not just a health check of your DevOps pipeline, especially if you have the right VSM tool. Let’s look at how your DevOps strategy can transform after 6-months of using a value stream management platform.
Starting with value stream mapping is kind of like a New Year’s resolution. You set yourself up for success with the tools and plans you need to make a change, but motivation is tough to sustain, especially when the source of your motivation – the new year – is months away. Value stream management is like New Year’s Day on repeat. With constant feedback and up-to-date measurement from all your disjointed DevOps tools, a good value stream management tool keeps your motivation going with reminders on what needs to change in your pipeline and why. If you stop at manual value stream management, you’ll get stuck in the New Year’s resolution motivation-decline trap. If you implement automation via a tool like HCL Accelerate, you’ll turn motivation into habits and see real progress.
In your first six months of value stream management, you could see improvements in the below factors, just to name a few:
- Lead time
- Cycle time
- Throughput
- Deployment/Build frequency
- Deployment/Build success rates
- Team alignment
This can be achieved if you prioritize fixing the big constraints and achieving easy wins instead of trying to take on everything at once. Most of these changes will occur on the left side of your pipeline – planning, design, and development. Maybe your VSM tool shows you that work is unevenly distributed among teams, causing delays in the pipeline. Or maybe you discover a manual process in the planning phase that can be automated. Or maybe you always had a hunch that an approval process was a bottleneck, but now you have the data to prove it and justify a change. In this second phase of value stream management, your goal is to automate what you can and focus on outcomes and quality.
Some organizations can struggle with what to fix first. VSM can surface lots of inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and flaws, which can make fixing them seem daunting. Don’t get discouraged – start with what you can fix right away and with what you can automate. And don’t be afraid to make changes. One of the most powerful aspects of value stream management is the ability to see exactly how changes in processes, tooling, and teams impact your flow. Use the data and reporting in HCL Accelerate to see how key metrics changed after implementing a new process. If you don’t like the results, you can always revert to the previous process or test another one. A comprehensive value stream management tool gives you the freedom to try new things and get clear results on how that change impacted your SDLC.
The real key to finding success in the first six months of value stream management is to build a data-driven DevOps culture. If your data is not big and visible across teams, if you don’t have VSM buy-in across seniority, and if you don’t have inter-departmental alignment on key performance indicators, your organization will never be able to realize the benefits of value stream management. Fortunately, a value stream management tool like HCL Accelerate assists in building the culture this methodology thrives in. HCL Accelerate provides equity of data across teams, seniorities, and departments so everyone in an organization can see what needs to be changed in a pipeline, why change needs to occur, and how that change impacts the organization. HCL Accelerate’s automated and customizable reports provide the transparency an organization needs to become more data-driven.
In just six months of using HCL Accelerate, you can achieve so many improvements in your DevOps pipeline. These shifts will clear the way for larger, more organization-wide changes to help you deliver better software faster. To see what value stream management looks like in HCL Accelerate, check out our on-demand interactive demo here.
