The Critical Role of Value Stream Management in the Future of Software Delivery

The Perfect Storm 

The VSM market has seen a significant amount of activity and growth in recent months. Investments, acquisitions and major new entrants are almost a monthly news item. And it’s no wonder as we are in a perfect storm from a market point of view. 

Think of the market in the context of the Venn diagram above. We are witnessing the convergence of technological innovation, applied to increasingly complex software development, and now faced with the impact of a global pandemic that has forced a work from home culture on the world. 

We’ve already noted the importance of software as a competitive differentiator throughout most if not all industries. The need to deliver software in response to customer expectations at a pace that satisfies this trend has increased to the point where traditional development methodologies do not work. This isn’t necessarily new as Agile and DevOps have been around for a good long while. But they’ve evolved in pockets and at different speeds. This has too often resulted in silos where communication, collaboration and dependencies suffer greatly. 

Automation has been served up as the path to success. But as important as automation is, the gains made in productivity are lost on an organization that doesn’t have clear visibility across the entire software development process – from idea to realization of value. It is that desire that has fueled the inception and corresponding growth of the Value Stream Management market. The speed that the vendors are innovating, and the increased understanding and sophistication of the prospects we are talking to has been a hallmark of this growing market and ecosystem. 

And then the world changed. Much has been written about the ‘new normal,’ and I am not going to repeat it all here. But the work from home mandate, which promises to outlast the virus, has created challenges for teams that rely on communication and collaboration to ensure that dependencies, as well as conflicts, are efficiently managed. Face-to-face interactions that simplify collaboration and overcome deficiencies in process and management, need to be replaced with a solution that ensures that software development doesn’t just continue, but that it delivers higher quality software faster than it ever has in an effort to delight the customers and serve the business.

Plutora and VSM

And that brings us back to Value Stream Management. VSM provides complete portfolio and pipeline visibility that allows teams to achieve smooth handoffs, governance and compliance and successfully facilitate collaboration, even in this increasingly distributed world. That promise has put VSM not just on the map, but it is one of the fastest growing market segments in the development space. Plutora is committed to continuing to deliver market leading solutions. Moreover, we see the overall growth of the VSM market and the corresponding innovation and adoption of the tools will play a fundamental role in accelerating digital transformation across the globe. We are thrilled to be a part of The Forrester Wave™: Value Stream Management Solutions, Q3 2020.