To help those teams gain insights into how products are advancing, Lucid Software is announcing enhancements to its visual collaboration platform that are designed to help elevate agile workflows by cultivating greater alignment, creating clarity and improving decision-making. 

“Visual collaboration is about seeing an entire workflow from the very beginning, enabling teams to align, make informed decisions and guide the initiative all the way to market delivery,” said Jessica Guistolise, an evangelist, Agile coach and consultant at Lucid. “Lucid excels at bringing all necessary information into one platform, supporting teams regardless of whether they follow Agile or simply need to iterate faster.”

Visuals, Guistolise said, are important for getting all stakeholders on the same page and improving the overall developer experience. “Prior to the pandemic, agile teams would gather in one room surrounded by visuals and sticky notes that displayed their work, vision, mission and tracked dependencies. Then, we all went home. Now where does all that information live?” Lucid, Guistolise explained, became a centralized hub for teams that have everything they need to do their work, day in and day out. 

Lucid’s latest release includes an emphasis on team-level coordination and program-level planning. On the team level, there are features for creating dedicated virtual team spaces for organizing such critical artifacts as charters, working agreements and more. Lucid’s platform replicates the benefits of physical team rooms and serves as a central hub for collaboration, where all needed documents are stored and can be shared. On the program level, real-time dependency mapping enables visualization and management of those dependencies directly from Jira and ADO. Other new features are structured big room planning templates to coordinate cross-functional work and the ability to sync project data between Lucid, Jira and ADO to have the most current information reflected across all platforms.

When it comes to team-level coordination, team spaces are customizable, allowing for a more personalized and engaging work experience. “When working with distributed teams, fostering a sense of team connection can be a challenge,” Guistolise said. “This brings some of that humanity and team experience. ‘What did you do this weekend? Can I see a picture of your dog?’ All of that can be done visually and it cultivates a shared understanding of one another, and not just of the work that we’re doing.” 

Speaking to how these features enhance the developer experience, Guistolise came to embrace agility because, she said, “when we bring humanity back into the workplace and elevate the overall team experience, we not only boost collaboration and efficiency but also foster connection that makes those moments more enjoyable.”

Customizable Agile templates are also available to help guide teams through daily standups, sprint planning retrospectives and other Agile events by offering integrated tools such as timers, laser pointers and the ability to import Jira issues. 

Lucid also offers a private mode to allow for anonymous contributions of ideas and feedback. Guistolise explained that private mode offers psychological safety “to allow for those voices who may not feel comfortable speaking up or even dissenting in a meeting.” Private mode, she added, still allows teams to surface that information anonymously, which means better decisions will be made in the long run. The release also includes new estimation capabilities for streamlining sprint planning using a poker-style approach, and those estimates can be synced with Jira or ADO to align planning and execution.

Further, two-way integrations with Jira and Azure DevOps mean that “no one has to take pictures of the sticky notes on the walls and then type it into a back-end system so there’s a record of what is going on,” she said. Instead, because of the integrations, everything moves automatically back and forth between systems, providing updated, real-time information upon which to make those business and development decisions.

These latest innovations from Lucid Software empower developer teams to have a more positive working experience by providing the tools they need to navigate the complexities of Agile workflows, from daily coordination to large-scale program planning. By enhancing both team-level and program-level collaboration, Lucid continues to lead the way in providing the most intelligent and comprehensive visual collaboration platform to support modern teams.

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The new solution, underpinned by the ConnectALL platform it acquired in June 2023, gathers, organizes and evaluates disparate DORA and flow metrics to provide real-time, role-based dashboards to development teams, dev managers and organization leaders to use for informed decision-making.  

“By integrating and organizing data from diverse sources across the value chain, ValueOps Insights provides the information organizations need to make better business decisions,” said Jean-Louis Vignaud, Head of ValueOps in Broadcom’s Agile Operations Division. The ability to match investment with the capability to deliver products leads to “successful value realization,” the company noted in its announcement.

This enables monitoring of investment decisions against product outcomes, and confirmation that planned product capabilities translate into tangible investment outcomes. By aligning investment intent with execution capability, we help organizations ensure successful value realization.

DORA and Flow metrics are all about delivery efficiency, but Vignaud noted, “that doesn’t mean we’re smart in what we do. The ideal view of the word is, ‘I plan for value, I deliver value and I measure the value realization.” While the full vision for Insights includes a value planning tool that will be integrated in the next quarter, Vignuad said, “We can start to be a bit smarter because of Flow analytics and DORA metrics.”

To broaden the value proposition, Broadcom is working on value realization. As Vignaud explained, “We capture early metrics, ensuring that indeed you are realizing the value you said you would be realizing when you do the investment.” 

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Broadcom’s ‘Three Pillars’ of value stream management

Organizational alignment is the key to delivering customer value

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One answer to this is by ensuring there is alignment throughout the organization, from business priority to ideation to production and delivery, and with marketing and sales on board. And that is done through the creation of value streams, which provide insights into how those teams are operating and continuing (or not) to meet organizational goals.

“When you think about alignment, you have to think about it across our whole value streams of tools, people and processes,” explained Lance Knight, Chief Value Stream Architect at Broadcom-AOD.

According to Broadcom, its ValueOps platform helps tear down organizational silos and helps teams collaborate by providing a single platform that ensures planning a project and delivering outcomes are aligned. When thinking about alignment, it has to bring in all the organization’s value streams of tools, people and process, Knight explained, adding that alignment has to be both downward and upward.

“Let’s say you’re in operations, and you’re working on things, but do those activities align to the outcomes and goals that you’re trying to achieve?” he noted. “Do they align to your OKRs? Do they align to cost and spending?”

Or, he said, let’s say you’re a developer and a defect comes in from a customer, and you think that’s something you need to prioritize and fix right away. But that may not align to the business goal, and isn’t connected to the prioritization alignments in portfolio management. So, while pushing the goals and objectives downward from the business, it’s also important to allow upward alignment, where portfolio teams have awareness of what the different units are working on and say that, yes, there’s technical debt to be cleaned up, but perhaps it’s not important that it get done today to achieve the goals.

However, Knight noted, communication is a two-way street, and perhaps a developer could argue that something in the code needs to be fixed today, even though it might not align with the business goals. 

Alignment, he pointed out, is about sharing the same vision by having all the information about what the teams are working on and knowledge about any particular artifact. That information flows up and down the value stream, in an automated and connected way, within the ValueOps platform.

Tying together Clarity, Rally, ConnectALL and Insights – ValueOps by Broadcom’s business stakeholders have an understanding of why teams are fixing what they’re fixing. And this alignment, Knight said, solves other problems as well. “With alignment,” he said, “you establish trust … trust that we’re building the right things.”

SECOND OF THREE PARTS

PART 1: Three pillars of value stream management
PART 3: Optimize organizational efficiency to drive customer value

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Despite the wrangling over terminology, the industry seems to have agreed that the notion of delivering value has three generally agreed-upon phases: visibility; alignment of strategy, planning and work; and optimizing efficiency. In this article, we will focus on increasing visibility.

The desired business outcomes are to enhance decision-making, improve trust in data, and minimize risk.

In a January research report by Broadcom on global value stream management trends, one of the biggest challenges organizations face in making a digital transformation and delivering value was the lack of data visibility across the enterprise, hampering efforts to make the kinds of business decisions that maximize value.

Laureen Knudsen, Chief Transformation Officer at Broadcom, said, “I think people now realize that their original view on digital transformation, where they just wanted to automate portions of the process, isn’t good enough. If you can’t see work flowing through your organization, or if data or processes still live in silos, you won’t have a realistic picture of where your organization stands.” Knudsen went on to say that the key to success lies in integrating and tying all of these pieces together with trustworthy data.

What ValueOps does for customers is to enable them to define, model, measure, prioritize and fund the initiatives that they value most. It accurately models complex business operations and scenarios to enable the proper definition and tracking of value. Organizationally, this helps organizations move beyond projects to include business value streams and product portfolios.

Another problem organizations say they have is that stakeholders don’t trust data from other teams, and that these silos create friction between different teams and roles. ValueOps brings metrics from different systems together to create a single source of truth, and connects this development data to the value definition, which enables the measurement of value creation and ROI in real time. Once generated, each stakeholder in the process can obtain the insights that are most relevant to them.

Finally, ValueOps can minimize risk by synchronizing business objectives and funding with ongoing development and delivery efforts, which allows the solution to flag risk and dependencies whenever change occurs. All of this enables organizations to pivot more quickly since they have real-time access to trusted data, which eliminates silos across the pipeline and allows for the rapid identification of delays and bottlenecks.

“We give organizations the ability to align their teams and gain visibility into every part of the delivery lifecycle, from an idea to customer value realization,” Knudsen said. “Did customers like what we did, and were we able to generate value for them quickly? Our solutions automate the processes and give visibility into all that data, up and down the organization.”

“This type of strategy can work well for your organization, allowing leaders to have the dashboards they need to make good prioritization decisions. It makes it a lot easier for companies to really understand what’s going on, so they can optimize any part of the product life cycle that isn’t working well.”

So what used to be called engineering efficiency, developer observability, or other buzzwords is now converging into value stream management – an overarching practice that organizations are quickly learning is a key solution that delivers on that promise of delivering more customer value.

This article was created by SD Times and Broadcom Software

FIRST OF THREE PARTS

PART 2: Organizational alignment is the key to delivering customer value
PART 3: Optimize organizational efficiency to drive customer value

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Of the 96% of responding companies that say they’ve undertaken a value stream management initiative, driving long-term customer value is their focus, according to the survey.

Value stream management is a process that involves spotting and eliminating bottlenecks in the development and delivery cycles with the result of continuously improving performance, quality and customer satisfaction…

Read the full article on VSM Times.

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This AI assistant, trained using a comprehensive dataset, provides operational insights in Portfolio Management, Value Stream Management, and Agile Planning and Delivery. It aims to expedite data-driven strategic decision-making through a conversational interface.

“As organizations embark on a growing number of digital transformation initiatives while leveraging a plethora of tools to execute them, there is a tremendous opportunity to reimagine how smarter decisions can be made to accelerate business outcomes,” said Razat Gaurav, CEO at Planview. “Planview Copilot leverages all the relevant data across project and product initiatives and brings insights, decision support, and actions through a simple, conversational interface. This is an important evolution in our journey from being a system of record to becoming a system of insights for digital transformations.”

Planview Copilot distinguishes itself by utilizing a vast range of operating data sources that are not accessible to other AI assistants. This includes exclusive strategy-to-delivery data from Planview’s portfolio planning, enterprise agile planning, and delivery solutions. It also incorporates broader data from various team tools through over 60 of Planview’s connectors in the Flow Fabric. 

It can also access an organization’s past and present initiative data. By combining this data with methodologies like Planview’s Flow Methodology and Agile Principles, Planview Copilot has the capability to coach and mentor users, helping them identify and address bottlenecks throughout the entire strategy-to-execution process.

“Building the future of connected work starts with a deep, insightful understanding of how our customers deliver services, launch products, and successfully implement their strategies,” said Richard Sonnenblick, chief data scientist at Planview. “That understanding begins with customer data: We apply AI and machine-learning methods to each customer’s current and historical operational data to predict task completion, provide early warning about tasks requiring course correction, and highlight disconnects between strategic goals and in-flight activities. Through Planview Copilot, generative AI is the icing on the cake, offering an easy-to-use, conversational gateway to these sophisticated AI/ML insights.”

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To meet these challenges, many organizations are turning to value stream management (VSM). VSM optimizes the entire process of building and delivering products and services, all while focusing on customer value. Providing data transparency and alignment between IT and business teams results in successful business outcomes.

To learn more from the report, click here.

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Since that fateful night, this methodology has become a stronghold of software development. In Digital.ai’s most recent State of Agile report, 94% of respondents were practicing Agile, and 32% have been doing so for at least 5 years. 

The original Agile Manifesto contained a list of four values:

1. “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
4. Responding to change over following a plan”

In recent years, one of the biggest shifts in how companies practice Agile is, unsurprisingly, having to accommodate a whole new style of working. According to Digital.ai’s survey, only 3% said they planned to return to the office full time. 25% said they will remain fully remote and 56% will use a hybrid approach where people will be in the office some of the time, but not all. 

“In last year’s survey we found fewer who are completely remote than planned, but still about half of respondents are mostly remote,” said Wing To, vice president of engineering for value stream delivery platform & DevOps at Digital.ai. “Expect some adjustments over the next few years as leaders try different approaches.” 

According to Aaron Morris, owner of the educational platform agile-innovations.tech, the early days of Agile required teams to be located in the same place because there would need to be a daily stand-up meeting and a shared board to track sprints, which was often just a whiteboard on a wall. 

“Since then, technology has advanced so much that distributed teams are no longer a big deal.  Stand-up meetings happen over MS Teams or Zoom, and the team board is hosted in a shared cloud app like Jira,” said Morris. “I once worked on a team where our developers were distributed across Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Brazil, Turkey, and Russia…but we worked from the same sprint board and met every day at 10am Eastern.”

So, while the Agile Manifesto may favor “individuals and interactions over processes and tools,” tools have become quite a necessity to facilitate the communication and collaboration needed to do Agile correctly these days. 

“Communication is important,” said Raveesh Dewan, CEO of Joget, an open-source low-code platform. “Not just verbal, but what you are doing in the tools is equally important.”

Dewan’s team is fully remote, so it’s absolutely crucial that everyone is providing updates into the tools so that everyone is on the same page and they can track progress. An example he gave is if there are 10 user stories on your plate and you have only finished five within the planned time frame, then you have a better sense of the actual velocity of the project. 

“That’s pretty much it, there is no rocket science behind it, there is no mantra behind it that ‘thou shalt do it this way.’ It is just a matter of being disciplined and making sure that I have given my updates today,” he said.

According to Digital.ai’s survey, the most common types of tools that people use include Kanban boards, taskboards, spreadsheets, agile project management tools, bug trackers, and wikis. 

Popular tools to use for Agile include Atlassian Jira, Azure DevOps, Broadcom Rally, Trello, and even just Google Docs. According to the survey, 48% of respondents are using Google Docs for Agile planning. 

It’s also important to keep the people aspect front and center when working remotely. For example, Yemisi Iyilade, product management coach and educator, said that at her company there is a rule to always have your camera on. She believes there’s a lot of communication that happens just in your body language, and you would miss out on that if you were only communicating through voice. 

“Even if your little child is there, it’s okay … because we understand that you are a person before your work,” she said. 

Speaking on the importance of people, she also highlighted that it’s important that all employees feel appreciated and valued. This can be accomplished through regular one on one meetings. 

Another thing many companies do to accomplish this is to provide flexibility around work hours. “Some companies now have a few hours in the day as mandatory hours,” she said. “This means that those are the only hours, maybe four hours out of the seven or eight hours, that you are mandated to be online. The other hours, you can spread it according to your own personal day.”

Agile moves beyond software development

While Agile was originally developed as a way to improve software development, it’s actually moving out of software development teams and all sorts of business teams are experimenting with and using Agile. 

According to the Digital.ai survey, 86% of respondents used Agile in their software development teams. But 63% use it in IT, 29% use it in operations, 17% use it in marketing, 17% use it in security, 16% use it in human resources, 11% use it in sales, and 10% use it in finance. And 52% say that a majority of their company’s teams have adopted Agile.   

Morris explained that for quite a long time, Agile was viewed suspiciously by business managers, especially in regulated industries. He recounted how when he was first starting out as a developer, he worked for a medical device company and his team spent six months persuading their manager to let them even try a few Scrum sprints. 

“Now, agile development is a common practice in most industries,” he said. “And even in regulated industries—where waterfall development is still king—there’s a strong movement towards agile, and much fewer people view it with the same suspicion as 10+ years ago.”

Encourage a culture of failure

Another side effect of the COVID-19 pandemic is the need to be ready to innovate, always. This includes encouraging a culture of failure, according to Iyilade.

This doesn’t mean that you necessarily want things to fail, but that you want to be able to try new things without the fear of failure. 

“The reality is innovation is saying ‘we don’t know how to do this. Let’s try. And we tried it, and this is what we got. And it’s okay. The next time we’ll do it better, doesn’t mean we failed. It means we’ve learned something new,’” she said.

As an example, Iyilade said to imagine a team that wants to develop a dashboard to view the status of a project or product. The first iteration may have a bit of risk associated with it, but by the second iteration, the team has learned from whatever went wrong on the first try and can do those things differently on the next go. 

“We want to focus on the new learnings, the creative ideas that just came out, the new knowledge that came out,” she said. 

The emergence of value stream management

Another methodology that has sprung up in the past few years that ties in nicely with Agile is value stream management.

According to Cameron van Orman, chief strategy officer at Planview, value stream management is important because it provides a holistic view of the whole value chain and can help identify areas that could be improved. 

It can be used to help create a culture of transparency, break down silos, and align business goals. 

“With a focus on delivering value to customers and shifting from project to product, the entire organization can work towards a common goal and align business objectives. As Agile continues evolving and gaining popularity, organizations must continuously refine their Agile practices to meet changing circumstances,” he said.  

According to van Orman, newer Agile frameworks like the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) work well with value stream management too. He said that combined, they offer “a solid foundation for organizations to succeed in remote and hybrid environments.”

Low-code and Agile make a perfect pair

As mentioned earlier, the first value of the original Agile Manifesto of “individuals and interactions over processes and tools,” has sort of fallen off. Low-code is another example of this, as it really enables people to think in a more Agile way and promotes experimentation.

According to Dewan, the ability to quickly drag and drop components enables you to go faster and try more things out. 

“Low-code takes it to a different level because it makes everything visual,” he said. “You can drag and drop while collaborating, while having the conversation, so cycles of iterations go faster.”

This iterative approach with low-code becomes even more powerful when combined with fusion teams: separate teams in the business working with IT. “It can quickly show them these are the options, and iterate through those options much faster than traditional application development,” said Dewan.

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This integration is intended to bring together the UiPath Business Automation Platform with Planview’s VSM solution Planview Tasktop Hub. This combination allows teams to enhance their automation of repetitive tasks, minimize manual mistakes, and speed up delivery of products.

Planview Tasktop Hub offers CIOs and transformation leaders the ability to keep track of value flow and business outcomes by combining efficient toolchains with a tech stack that improves productivity, reduces bottlenecks, improves time-to-market, and cuts down on lost revenue.

Read the full story here on VSM Times.

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Now, the country is in another period of uncertainty. You’ve read the headlines all year: The Great Resignation, layoffs, a possible recession, Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter shaking up marketing spending, introductions of things like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT having workers worrying about their future job security, and more. The list could go on and on, but one thing that would help people through these times is knowing they’ll make it out okay on the other end. 

Unfortunately that level of predictability isn’t always possible in the real world, but in the business world, value stream management can help you with it.

According to Lance Knight, president and COO of ConnectALL, the information you can get from value stream management can help you with predictability. This includes things like understanding how information flows and how you get work done. 

“You can’t really be predictable until you understand how things are getting done,” said Knight. 

He also claimed that predictability is a more important outcome of value stream management than the actual delivery of value, simply because of the fact that “you can’t deliver value unless you have a predictable system.” 

Derek Holt, general manager of Intelligent DevOps at Digital.ai, agreed, adding “If we can democratize the data internally, we can not only get a better view, but we can start to use things like machine learning to predict the future. Like, how do we not just show flow metrics, but how do we find areas for flow acceleration? Not just what are our quality metrics, but how do we drive quality improvement? A big one we’re seeing right now is predicting risk and changing risk. How do you predict that before it happens?”

Knight also said that a value stream is only as effective as the information that you feed into it, so you really need to amplify feedback loops, remove non-value-added activities and add automation. Then once your value stream is optimized, you can realize the benefit of predictability. 

If you’ve already been working with value streams for a while then it may be time to make sure all those pieces are running smoothly and look for areas where there is waste that can be removed. 

Knight also explained the importance of embracing the “holistic part” in value stream management. What he means by this is not just thinking about metrics, but thinking about how you can train people to understand Lean principles so that they can understand how the way they develop software will meet their digital transformation needs. 

Challenges companies face 

Of course, all that is easier said than done. There are still challenges that companies face after adopting value stream management to actually get to the maturity level where they gain that predictability. 

One issue is that there is confusion in the market caused by vendors about what value stream management actually is. “Some people think value stream management is the automation of your DevOps pipeline. Some people think value stream management is the metrics that I get. And there’s confusion between value management and value stream management,” said Knight. 

Knight wants us to remember that value stream management isn’t anything new; It can trace its origins back to Lean Manufacturing created by Toyota in the 1950s in Japan.  

And ultimately, value is just the delivery of goods and services. Putting any other definition on it is just the industry being confused, Knight believes. 

“So people who are trying to implement value streams are getting mixed messages, and that’s the number one challenge with value stream management,” said Knight.

Digital.ai’s Holt explained that another challenge, especially for those just getting started, is getting overwhelmed. 

“Don’t be paralyzed by how big it seems,” said Holt. He recommends companies have early conversations acknowledging that they might get things wrong, and just get started. 

Where has value stream been? Where is it headed? 

In our last Buyer’s Guide on value stream management, the theme was that it aligns business and IT. 

Holt has seen in the past year that companies are adopting mentalities that are less about that alignment. Now the focus is that software is the business and the business is software. 

In this new mentality, metrics have become crucial, so it’s important to have a value stream management system in place that actually enables you to track certain metrics. 

“Things like OKRs continued to kind of explode as a simple means to drive better outcome-based alignment … simple KPIs around objective-based development efforts or outcome-based development efforts,” said Holt. 

Holt also noted that in Digital.ai’s recently published 16th annual State of Agile report, around 40% of respondents had adopted one of these approaches, and that was significantly up from the previous year. 

He went on to explain that companies investing in value stream management want to be sure that their investments are actually paying off, especially in the current economic climate.

He also said value streams can help organizations make small, evolutionary improvements, rather than one big revolution. 

“Value stream management is building on some of the core transformations that happened before,” said Holt. “Wiithout the Agile transformation, there would have been no DevOps, and without Agile and DevOps, there probably wouldn’t be an ability to talk about value stream management.”

So value stream management will continue to build on the successes of the past, while also layering in new trends like low code, explained Holt. 

What sets successful value stream management practices apart

Chris Condo, principal analyst at Forrester, last month wrote a blog post where he laid out the three qualities that set successful value stream management practitioners apart. 

1. Use of AI/ML to predict end dates. According to Condo, development teams with access to predictive capabilities are able to use them to create timelines that are more likely to be met. He noted that the successful teams don’t replace estimates produced by people on their team, but rather augment those estimates with machine estimation. 
2. Bottleneck analysis. Teams can use value stream management to discover what the real cause of their bottlenecks is. “When it comes to VSM, too many clients put the cart before the horse, thinking that they need a high-performing DevOps culture and tool chain to effectively use VSM. None of this could be further from the truth,” said Condo.
3. Strong metrics and KPIs. Development leaders want these metrics if they are going to be putting money into value stream management, so look for vendors that can provide excellent metrics. 

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