Driving DevOps with Value Stream Management

Cecil 'Gary' Rupp, Helen Beal

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781801076548
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Information Technology
• Index: Computer Science

A practical guide to implementing Value Stream Management to guide your strategic investments in DevOps capabilities and deliver customer-centric value quickly and economicallyKey Features• Address DevOps implementation issues, including culture, toolchain costs, improving work and information flows, and product team alignment• Implement proven VSM methodology to improve IT value stream flows• Leverage VSM platforms to view, analyze, and improve end-to-end value deliveryBook DescriptionValue Stream Management (VSM) opens the door to maximizing your DevOps pipeline investments by improving flows and eliminating waste. VSM and DevOps together deliver value stream improvements across enterprises for a competitive advantage in the digital world. Driving DevOps with Value Stream Management provides a comprehensive review and analysis of industry-proven VSM methods and tools to integrate, streamline, and orchestrate activities within a DevOps-oriented value stream.You'll start with an introduction to the concepts of delivering value and understand how VSM methods and tools support improved value delivery from a Lean production perspective. The book covers the complexities of implementing modern CI/CD and DevOps pipelines and then guides you through an eight-step VSM methodology with the help of a use case showing an Agile team's efforts to install a CI/CD pipeline. Free from marketing hype or vendor bias, this book presents the current VSM tool vendors and customer use cases that showcase their products' strengths. As you advance through the book, you'll learn four approaches to implementing a DevOps pipeline and get guidance on choosing the best fit.By the end of this VSM book, you'll be ready to develop and execute a plan to streamline your software delivery pipelines and improve your organization's value stream delivery.What you will learn• Integrate Agile, systems thinking, and lean development to deliver customer-centric value• Find out how to choose the most appropriate value stream for your initial and follow-on VSM projects• Establish better flows with integrated, automated, and orchestrated DevOps and CI/CD pipelines• Apply a proven eight-step VSM methodology to drive lean IT value stream improvements• Discover the key strengths of modern VSM tools and their customer use case scenarios• Understand how VSM drives DevOps pipeline improvements and value delivery transformations across enterprisesWho this book is forThis book will help corporate executives, managers, IT team members, and other stakeholders involved in digital business transformations to improve the flow of customer value through their IT-based value streams. It will provide you with the practical guidance you need while adopting Lean-Agile, Value Stream Management, and DevOps capabilities on an enterprise scale to enable business agility. A basic understanding of how CI/CD and DevOps pipelines improve software delivery capabilities via integrated and automated toolchains will help you to make the most of the book.

Section 1:Value Delivery

Chapters 1 through 5 introduce the core concepts behind adding value, Lean-Agile practices, systems thinking, and value stream management. They apply to modern IT practices and other value streams that deliver value across the enterprise. These concepts are also foundational to the knowledge you need to learn how to apply the concepts in section 2 of this book – VSM Methodology – a Lean-oriented and proven approach to make flow improvements across an enterprise.

In the first three chapters, you will learn how to focus on adding customer-centric value across an enterprise by blending Agile, systems thinking, and Lean development practices. Then, in Chapter 4, Improving IT Value Streams with VSM, you will learn about how value stream management (VSM) is an approach to improve Lean production capabilities across all value streams, including IT. Finally, in Chapter 5, Driving Business Value through a DevOps Pipeline, you will learn what a DevOps pipeline is and why it's the best approach to deliver value in a digital economy.

Modern VSM tools support implementing Lean improvements across IT value streams and improve DevOps pipeline implementations. In that context, these chapters help explain why the effective implementation of a DevOps pipeline – as an efficient software delivery system – is the necessary “table stake” that allow an organization to compete in our modern digital economy.

This section includes the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, Delivering Customer-Centric Value
• Chapter 2, Building on a Lean-Agile Foundation
• Chapter 3, Analyzing Complex Systems Interactions
• Chapter 4, Improving IT Value Streams with VSM
• Chapter 5, Driving Business Value through a DevOps Pipeline

Chapter 1: Delivering Customer-Centric Value

This chapter introduces the many different definitions of value and explains how Agile, Systems Thinking, and Lean Development work together to deliver customer-centric value. With this base of understanding, Value Stream Management (VSM) and DevOps(development-operations) are also introduced as complementary Information Technology (IT) practices and tools to support Lean-Agile practices.

You will learn how VSM helps maximize the flow of customer value across an organization's software development and delivery processes. For example, VSM helps improve the flow of work across systems development life cycle (SDLC) processes when developing applications supporting business operations.

However, VSM cannot be just about improving software development and delivery practices for business systems in a digital economy. Many commercial businesses, government agencies, and nonprofits offer information-oriented products and services delivered as web-based services. Additionally, many physical products incorporate computing devices, software, and internet access to deliver new features and enhanced functionality on demand and throughout their life cycles.

For these reasons, the use of VSM methods and tools must go beyond IT to help improve workflows and information flow across operations and development-oriented value streams.

DevOps improves communications across IT departments in a complementary fashion, while integrating and automating IT processes to enable a continuous flow of customer-centric value across all organizational value streams. As a result, a modern DevOps team can deliver value orders of magnitude more efficiently, rapidly, and error-free than with traditional SDLC and Agile practices.

In this chapter, you will learn how these practices work in concert to deliver customer-centric value. The topics covered include the following:

• Defining the term value in its many forms
• Developing a value proposition
• Creating value
• Taking a Lean-Agile view of value
• Understanding VSM
• Understanding the role of DevOps in delivering value
• Integrating Lean, Agile, VSM, and DevOps

Defining the term value in its many forms

This book is fundamentally about creating digital transformations to deliver customer-centric value efficiently, rapidly, and at a lower cost. Such a strategy involves including and aligning IT with the value stream transformations occurring across the enterprise. VSM is a Lean production improvement strategy that's found new applications in IT. Since VSM is the primary focus of this book, let's start with definitions of value in a VSM context.

Viewing value from a Lean-oriented perspective

Value streams are a Lean production concept that describes the series of product life cycle activities required to guide product deliveries from ideation through creation, deployment, support, retirement, and sustainment. As the name value stream implies, the whole point is to ensure all product delivery activities add value. From the perspective of Lean, adding customer-centric value means going beyond the provisioning of features and functions to also eliminate all forms of waste that customers don't want to have added to their costs.

VSM is an approach to methodically eliminate waste and improve productivity and efficiency while lowering costs. More precisely, you will learn that VSM encompasses Lean-oriented methods to improve work and information flow across value streams. Modern VSM tools support the VSM methods initially developed by Toyota as an approach to map material and information flows, and then later introduced to the rest of the world in the early 2000s (Jones, Womack, 2003).

When we get to the sections on Lean-Agile views and VSM, you will also find there are two forms of value streams: operations and development. Let's take a quick look at the differences between these two types of value streams.

Differentiating development from operations

Operations-oriented value streams deliver products and services to an organization's external customers, while development value streams create things used or delivered by the organization's operations-oriented value streams.

Let's put this another way, as follows:

• Operations value streams include the work and information flow that define how your company—or its product lines or lines of business (LOBs)—conducts business, earns revenue, and delivers services to its customers.
• Development value streams include work and information flows to build and support the products, services, and other artifacts used by the operations-oriented value streams to deliver value.

Operations-oriented value streams enhance customer experiences by providing products, information, and services, either online or through personal contacts. In contrast, development-oriented value streams create products and services for either internal or external customers. In other words, development value streams build stuff, while operations value streams need to sell, deliver, and support the organization's customers.

Both functions are necessary and value-adding. However, making a distinction between development and operations is important in terms of purpose, planning horizons, and who controls and funds the activities. For example, LOB executives and product owners have accountability over investment priorities in their operations-oriented value stream activities. In contrast, portfolio management team controls investment priorities over development-oriented stream activities.

Another way to look at this distinction is the operations-oriented processes of selling, delivering, and supporting products. These are tactical activities that provide value to our customers, usually over relatively short planning horizons. Development value stream investments tend to be larger, are critical to the organization's long-term survival, and require longer planning and implementation horizons. In contrast, development-oriented value streams help ensure the organization has the infrastructure, products, and services to meet its strategic objectives.

At first glance, this distinction between development and operations seems to support the traditional IT organizational model. Development teams create software products for both internal and external customers or users, and operations teams exist to keep systems running, secure, and available, while also resolving customer and user issues via helpdesk ser...

Table of contents

• Driving DevOps with Value Stream Management
• Foreword
• Preface
• Section 1:Value Delivery
• Chapter 1: Delivering Customer-Centric Value
• Chapter 2: Building On a Lean-Agile Foundation
• Chapter 3: Analyzing Complex System Interactions
• Chapter 4: Defining Value Stream Management
• Chapter 5: Driving Business Value through a DevOps Pipeline
• Section 2:VSM Methodology
• Chapter 6: Launching the VSM Initiative (VSM Steps 1-3)
• Chapter 7: Mapping the Current State (VSM Step 4)
• Chapter 8: Identifying Lean Metrics (VSM Step 5)
• Chapter 9: Mapping the Future State (VSM Step 6)
• Chapter 10: Improving the Lean-Agile Value Delivery Cycle (VSM Steps 7 and 8)
• Section 3:VSM Tool Vendors and Frameworks
• Chapter 11: Identifying VSM Tool Types and Capabilities
• Chapter 12: Introducing the Leading VSM Tool Vendors
• Chapter 13: Introducing the VSM-DevOps Practice Leaders
• Chapter 14: Introducing the Enterprise Lean-VSM Practice Leaders
• Section 4:Applying VSM with DevOps
• Chapter 15: Defining the Appropriate DevOps Platform Strategy
• Chapter 16: Transforming Businesses with VSM and DevOps
• Assessments
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