Flow or DevOps Metrics? When to Use What for Your Value Streams

Value stream management (VSM) shares a drive for efficiency with DevOps. Both VSM and DevOps look to identify and remove bottlenecks in software development and delivery to increase operational efficiency and collaboration.

However, VSM and DevOps are guided by different metrics. VSM focuses on the efficiency of the flow of work across the system of software development and delivery using the value stream flow metrics.  Alternatively, DevOps utilizes the DORA metrics which while also focused on efficiency, target different components of the value stream. To know when and how to use both sets of metrics effectively you first need to understand how each guides us to improve our pipelines.