If you asked your team members to map out your entire product or service lifecycle from beginning to end, some steps would be left out or not considered. A clear understanding of workflow is crucial to improving organizational performance and predicting software delivery.
The perfect solution is Value Stream Mapping (VSM). It provides a future ideal state to deliver maximum value to the customer.
It is an effective tool for DevOps teams to distill their entire process into a single diagram. It allows stakeholders to understand how value flows quickly. Value stream maps help teams to visualize the ideal future state and to drill down into what improvements are required to reach that optimal value stream.
What is Value Stream Mapping
Value stream mapping helps you visualize the flow of your processes. This is a core technique of Lean principles to add value and eliminate waste in your software delivery process. The VSM helps teams identify bottlenecks and destroy them.
Three key steps are required to conduct a VSM:
Create a current state map showing the process as it is today from the delivery order.
Analyze your current process state and find ways to improve it.
Create an improved state map that shows the areas to improve.
VSM benefits and purpose
VSM identifies areas for improvement within your product’s lifecycle. The value stream in DevOps begins with the development and moves on to QA testing. It ends up at release, which is a measure of whether or not the product or feature meets user expectations.
VSM is an instrument for continuous improvement. After completing a VSM, you will have objective data that you can use to guide and advocate for improvements.
VSM benefits include:
Waste within your value chain
Create a blueprint to improve
Identify the delays and constraints in your processes
Enhance visibility across the entire product lifecycle
Automated opportunities revealed
Collaboration across teams: Boost it!
Clarity and context are essential for making informed decisions
Allow stakeholders to quickly see how value flows
Three pillars for a value stream mapping
Value stream maps are built on three central pillars – information flow, processes flow, and the time ladder. Your value stream map will include each of these pillars, showing how your product or services generate value from beginning to end.
Information flow
Communication is essential for any product or service that you build. A value stream can show how work is transferred from one team to another and highlight any areas of poor communication.
Process flow
The process flow is also known as production or material flow. It refers to all your team’s tasks as your product or services move from beginning to end. Looking at the process flow, you can see the waste and waiting in your value stream.
Time ladder
It can be used to identify waste or value added at each stage. It uses two metrics:
Active State (or Touch Time): The total time spent actively working on a feature at each stage
The waiting state (or the queue time) is: how long a part waits at each step.
Create a map showing the current state of your product or services
Identify the value stream that you wish to map. It could be your product or service, but it could also be process-based, like your backlog or deployment process. If you are still trying to decide what to map, consider what part of your delivery pipeline is the most problematic or will bring the most outstanding value to your team.
Then, identify key stakeholders at each stage of the value stream for service or product development. It may be stakeholders, architects and developers, IT ops and security members, or members of the IT operations team. This is a way to improve collaboration between people working on different phases and to ensure that the whole team understands other processes.
You can then begin creating a map of the current state. This can be done by breaking down your value stream into 5-15 process blocks, representing the steps required to deliver your service or product to your customer. Record the activities performed within each block and the team members performing them.
Record the time it took to complete the step, including the time spent on the touch. You can focus on a specific time metric such as hours, days, or weeks.
You can use the map to analyze your current state
After mapping your current state, you can gather information about bottlenecks and barriers in your value stream.
You can now include the time spent waiting between each process.
Tip: Record the actual state of the processes the day that you create your state map. Include actual metrics, not what your team wants them to be.
You can start tracking key metrics after gathering information about the people, processes, and technologies involved at each step. Also, note the wait and touch times. The metrics you track will vary depending on what value stream mapping team is doing, but they often include:
Time spent:This represents the time that was actually spent in a particular process. Non-value added time is any step that does not result in a product change.
Lead Time: The total time required to complete a particular task by a team or individual.
Complete/accurate (%C/A), This is the percentage of times that a process receives a product from a downstream process without requiring any rework.
Add these metrics to your state map. When you review each process block, be on the lookout for steps with poor quality or long lead times.
