Delivery Performance
16 minutes reading time
You’re constantly juggling tasks, trying to deliver faster, better results with fewer hiccups. Yet, bottlenecks keep slowing you down, communication across teams feels fragmented, and every delay chips away at your team’s efficiency. It’s frustrating to watch processes stall when you know there’s a better way to work.
The challenge is clear: how can you take charge of your workflow and create a system that drives the flow of business value seamlessly from start to finish? The answer lies in rethinking how you approach your delivery pipeline and using a process that prioritizes continuous improvement and real-time visibility.
At Axify, we provide tools that help you take charge of your entire value stream.
Our streamlined dashboards offer you data that can help you turn challenges into opportunities for improvement and align your team toward a common goal.
Let’s see exactly how.
What Is Value Stream Management?
Value stream management (VSM) means creating more effective workflows in your software delivery processes. It focuses on improving every step, from a customer request to the final delivery, so you can deliver value seamlessly. Instead of tackling tasks in silos, VSM provides a systematic approach to uniting teams, streamlining operations, and removing waste.
You’ll find VSM especially valuable for aligning your cross-functional teams. It helps you track flow efficiency, reduce cycle time, and enhance operational efficiency so your development teams can deliver faster without compromising on quality.
Focusing on the entire software delivery process allows you to make data-driven decisions that can directly impact your business outcomes.
DevOps value stream management (DVS) takes it further by integrating Agile and DevOps practices. It allows you to align your workflows for high-performance delivery and faster time to market. Whether it’s improving flow metrics or ensuring smoother collaboration across teams, DVS empowers you to focus on continuous delivery while addressing bottlenecks and delays.
Value Stream Management vs. Value Stream Mapping
Value stream management is an ongoing practice, while value stream mapping is a punctual activity.
Value stream management means constantly analyzing and improving workflows to deliver value efficiently across your organization. On the other hand, value stream mapping is visually representing the steps in your workflow to identify inefficiencies and bottlenecks.
Both are important to enhance efficiency and deliver value. Now, let's explain further.
Value Stream Mapping
As we explained above, value stream mapping means visualization. This method came from lean manufacturing, but it’s now extremely prevalent. You’ll use it to create a clear picture of your workflows from start to finish.
Why do it: Building stream maps helps you identify inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and waste in your current delivery processes. It also lets you see the workflow across your teams by highlighting delays or areas where resources are underused.
This mapping process is great for analyzing your software value stream. It gives you a snapshot of how work progresses, from the initial request to customer delivery.
Essentially, value stream mapping software can help you chart every step, measure active time versus wait time, and pinpoint improvement opportunities.
Value Stream Management
Value stream management takes mapping further. Instead of just visualizing your workflows, it’s about driving continuous improvement.
Why use it: You focus on making data-driven changes to enhance flow efficiency, reduce waste, and improve collaboration across your engineering teams.
A systematic approach allows value stream managers to analyze flow velocity, cycle time metrics, and other KPIs to ensure work moves smoothly through the entire delivery workflow. The goal is to create a process that consistently delivers value to your customers while aligning with your business goals.
Key Differences Between Mapping and Management
While value stream mapping is a foundational activity, value stream management is a broader practice. Mapping provides the visualization you need to start, but management uses those insights to create long-term, ongoing strategies.
|
Aspect |
Value Stream Mapping |
Value Stream Management |
|
Definition |
Visualizes the current workflow to identify inefficiencies. |
Implements strategies to address inefficiencies and sustain improvements. |
|
Purpose |
Answers "What" the inefficiencies are. |
Answers "How" to fix and manage them. |
|
Focus |
Diagnosing problems within the workflow. |
Fostering continuous delivery and team collaboration. |
|
Outcome |
Provides insights to start improving processes. |
Creates ongoing strategies for long-term optimization. |
|
Scope |
Foundational activity to understand workflows. |
Broader practice encompassing improvement and sustainability. |
Think of mapping as the "what" and management as the "how." Mapping identifies inefficiencies, while management helps you fix them and sustain improvements. The focus shifts from diagnosing problems to fostering continuous delivery and collaboration across teams.
Pro tip: Axify’s value stream mapping feature helps you tackle value stream management by offering real-time visibility and insightful metrics. Tracking these KPIs helps you see and tackle potential issues to improve your workflows and deliver quality products.
Benefits of Value Stream Management
Value stream management offers many benefits to your workflows by enhancing collaboration, identifying inefficiencies, and improving overall performance. Improving your development value stream and workflows can help you align your teams and resources to deliver value faster and more effectively.
Now, let's do the complete breakdown.
Breaking Down Silos for Collaboration and Transparency
When your teams work in isolation, communication gaps typically lead to delays and misaligned goals. VSM promotes cross-functional collaboration by encouraging open workflows and shared goals.
This fosters teamwork across development teams, operational value streams, and other departments. You gain real-time visibility into your delivery process, which makes it easier to align everyone toward a common objective.
Setting Accurate Benchmarks for Progress
To understand how well your delivery process is performing, you need clear benchmarks. VSM allows you to set key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure flow time, deployment speed, and other KPIs. This lets you track your progress over time and identify areas for consistent improvement.
Waste Identification to Enhance Resource Efficiency
In any process, inefficiencies creep in over periods of time. VSM helps you pinpoint waste, such as non-value-adding activities or resource bottlenecks.
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“Value stream management (VSM) has the potential to completely transform the process of funding, building, managing, and maintaining software at scale.” (Forrester) |
Using value stream management tools can help you redirect your efforts toward tasks that truly matter. Streamlining active time ensures that every part of your process contributes to your product delivery goals.
Enhanced DevOps Performance for Stability and Speed
VSM aligns seamlessly with Agile and DevOps practices, which gives you the tools to improve flow efficiency. Tracking flow items allows you to boost deployment frequency, reduce cycle time, and enhance stability across your software delivery processes. The result from that is faster product delivery and happier customers.
Improving Workflow Through Feedback Loops
Continuous improvement thrives on feedback. VSM integrates real-time feedback loops into your processes to help you make timely adjustments. Whether it’s identifying bottlenecks or fine-tuning tasks at the team level, feedback allows you to adapt and keep your workflows efficient.
Pro tip: You can use Axify’s CIO dashboard to connect engineering metrics directly to your business outcomes. It helps you see how your team’s performance drives value and impacts key objectives.
This image above shows Axify's CIO dashboard. You can see our key engineering metrics such as time to delivery, resource allocation, flow efficiency, velocity, and workload. These metrics will help you connect team performance to business outcomes so you can make informed decisions.
The Core Principles of Value Stream Management
Understanding and implementing the core principles of value stream management is how you create smoother workflows and deliver meaningful results. Here’s how to maximize efficiency and keep your teams aligned with your business goals.
1. Customer-Centric Approach
You must prioritize the value delivered to your customers at every step of your workflow. This principle keeps your efforts aligned with customer needs and ensures that every improvement you make enhances their experience. Focusing on their satisfaction helps you create a product value stream that consistently delivers results that your customers will appreciate.
2. Visibility Across Workflows
Clear visibility into your workflows allows you to track key metrics and improve flow efficiency. Jira Align and GitLab are both good value stream management platforms. They give you real-time visibility into each part of your delivery process – and Axify integrates with both. Transparency allows you to spot bottlenecks, reduce delays, and make smarter, data-driven decisions to enhance your operational efficiency.
3. Continuous Improvement Culture
Building a culture of ongoing analysis and refinement helps your teams turn process improvement into a habit. We believe that you should encourage your team to evaluate what’s working and what isn’t regularly.
Axify supports this mindset by providing deep insights and a reliable, single source of truth for the whole team. This can help you refine your value stream management process over time.
4. End-to-End Flow Focus
Focusing on the entire workflow ensures seamless collaboration across functions. When your teams work together, friction decreases, and efficiency increases. You can leverage tools to integrate efforts across departments to ensure a single value stream flows smoothly from idea to customer delivery.
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“A value stream is the sequence of activities necessary to deliver a product, service or experience to a customer, internal or external. Value streams cut across and connect siloed business capabilities. They provide end-to-end visibility of the activity flow, from customer request to delivery.” (Gartner) |
How to Implement Value Stream Management
Implementing value stream management is straightforward when you break it into actionable steps. Our process can help you improve your workflow and ensure consistent value delivery. Here's how:
- Identify the value stream: You can start by pinpointing the product or service that forms the foundation of your value stream. Understanding what drives value helps you set clear goals.
- Map the current state: Create a visual representation of your current workflow. Use stream mapping to outline every step from the initial idea to delivery. This step makes inefficiencies and redundancies visible.
- Analyze the value stream: You should examine the current state to identify what adds value and what doesn’t. Compare cycle time with wait time, uncover bottlenecks, and highlight areas of waste that need attention.
- Design the future state: We advise you to visualize how your workflow should look after improvements. Aim for a streamlined process that prioritizes efficiency and reduces unnecessary steps.
- Implement changes: This is where you put your plan into action. Start small, track the impact, and ensure your teams are aligned throughout the process.
- Learn, adapt, improve: Treat VSM as an ongoing cycle. You should continuously gather data, adapt to changes, and refine your workflow. Each iteration brings your teams closer to optimal performance.
Pro tip: Axify’s OKR tracker helps you align your goals with measurable outcomes so your VSM efforts remain focused on what matters most.
Key Metrics for Value Stream Management
Tracking the right metrics is essential for effective VSM. These metrics give you insights into your team’s performance, bottlenecks, and improvement areas. Axify simplifies this process by offering actionable metrics to help you measure and improve your workflows.
DORA Metrics in Axify
DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) metrics are a vital part of understanding your software delivery performance. Axify allows you to monitor these metrics seamlessly:
- Deployment frequency: See how frequently your team releases new code to production. Higher frequency means faster value delivery.
- Lead time for changes: Track the time from a change’s commit to deployment. Shorter lead times signal a more efficient development cycle.
- Change failure rate: Measure the percentage of deployments that require fixes or rollbacks. A lower rate reflects higher stability in your releases.
- Failed deployment recovery time (formerly MTTR and time to restore service): Evaluate how quickly your team restores service after an incident. Faster recovery times show resilience and readiness.
Flow Metrics in Axify
Flow metrics help you understand how work progresses through your value stream. Axify makes these insights accessible:
- Flow velocity: Monitors the number of completed tasks over a specific period. This metric helps you identify trends in your team’s productivity.
- Flow time: Measures the total time it takes for work items to move from start to finish. Use this to spot delays and improve your delivery pipeline.
- Flow efficiency: Calculates the ratio of active time versus wait time in your workflow. High efficiency means your processes are smooth and effective. As a side note, flow efficiency in Axify measures the ratio of active work time to total cycle time in the overall process. We think this gives you a better perspective of your workflow.
- Flow load: Keeps track of the amount of work in progress (WIP). Managing this ensures your team isn’t overloaded, which helps maintain focus and quality.
Visualize Your VSM with Axify
To make the most of VSM, you need clear visibility into your workflows. Visualization helps you identify inefficiencies, track progress, and ensure every effort contributes to your goals.
Axify makes this process simple with intuitive tools and dashboards that provide insightful data across the entire software development lifecycle. Here’s how Axify empowers you to visualize and manage your VSM effectively:
- End-to-end workflow visibility: Axify’s dashboards give you a clear, comprehensive view of your workflows. You can spot inefficiencies and dependencies across teams, which makes it easier to address bottlenecks and delays. This visibility allows you to understand exactly where the flow breaks down and how it impacts customer delivery.
- DORA metrics dashboard: Axify lets you track deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and failed deployment recovery time. These metrics provide a snapshot of your team’s performance and highlight areas for improvement in speed, stability, and overall process resilience.
- Flow metrics: Our flow metrics help you monitor how work moves through your teams. Visualizing throughput, cycle time, and work in progress allows you to measure and improve efficiency. Reducing cycle time and managing WIP ensures your workflows remain streamlined and productive.
- Value stream mapping: Mapping your value streams with Axify allows you to see every step, from ideation to deployment. This visualization highlights areas where tasks pile up, resources are underused, or processes stall. With this clarity, you can target specific parts of your software delivery pipeline for improvement.
- Resource allocation and WIP management: Axify lets you track work in progress and resource allocation across various stages. Based on this, set WIP limits to create smoother handoffs and faster throughput. Balanced resource allocation ensures your teams stay focused and avoid unnecessary delays.