Crossing the Chasm – VSM Consortium Releases its 2022 State of Value Stream Management Report

In doing so, the report suggests organizations should focus on a range of priorities, including:

• Use value streams to break the business and technology silos to create autonomous, multi-functional teams that only care about how fast they can deliver the best thing to the people that use it and pay for it.

• Start with a value stream mapping exercise to give everyone an understanding of each other's roles in delivering value and, with it, develop a common vision. This represents a first step that may lead to organizing around the value stream more permanently and inspire other value streams to reimagine the way they work.

• Incorporate Value Stream Management as a governance framework for agile and DevOps. This makes VSM a key governance concept that will empower organizations to not only create new value but also help ensure continuous improvement in their agile and DevOps practices.

• Treat VSM as an experiment. Organizations don’t have to adopt VSM wholesale from day one — instead, learning from agile, treat adoption as an evolutionary process driven by a series of experiments.

• Using metrics wisely. Lead time, cycle time, customer journey time, and revenue/sales are a few metrics that are used within value stream management. But, to effectively measure VSM, it is important to understand when deciding the impact and purpose of the actions the metrics will drive.

Quoted in the report, Plutora Chief Marketing Officer, Bob Davis, said:

“First of all, it’s promising — exciting even — to see this second research report on Value Stream Management get published. Like our VSM metrics themselves, trending information is critical! We are in the early stages of the market and can see the growing enthusiasm for the promise of VSM. There are several points in the research where there is an increase, sometimes a material increase, in the number of firms engaging in the early stages of the  VSM journey.”

He continued, “The challenges are real and are articulated clearly in the research. The most pressing hurdles include people — both leadership and culture, re-organizing around products and value streams, challenges in balancing long-term value with short-term gains when investing, and simply understanding what VSM is and the benefits it delivers. I continue to be optimistic about the future of VSM and its role in helping organizations effectively and efficiently improve their ability to deliver value to their customers. I would echo others’ advice to start small in their VSM journey; I would further recommend to vendors that we continue to simplify and standardize the integrations necessary to fuel the continuous improvement that is central to the promise of VSM.”

To download a full copy of the 2022 State of Value Stream Management Report, click here.