A survey of 501 business and IT leaders published this week found well over half (60%) have adopted some form of value stream management (VSM), but most of those efforts are still in the early stages, with 13% in planning, 25% having a pilot project and 23% applying VSM to a single project. Only 10% are applying VSM broadly across their application development initiatives.
Conducted by Dimensional Research on behalf of Broadcom, the survey found the most widely used VSM tools remain Excel spreadsheets (50%), followed by 42% using home-grown tools. Well over two-thirds (69%) share VSM metrics quarterly or monthly but only 9% indicate this data is being made available continuously, the survey finds.
Not surprisingly, only 36% said they have good or excellent visibility, while 21% characterize their visibility as either poor or a complete “black hole.”
Laureen Knudsen, chief transformation officer at Broadcom, said while VSM progress is being made, there is clearly much work to be done. To facilitate those efforts, Broadcom is now making available a VSM Maturity Model describing the five stages organizations will need to navigate before fully mastering VSM.
The primary reasons cited for adopting VSM include efficiency (79%), customer experience (71%), customer value (62%), profitability (60%) and alignment (44%). In general, organizations are adopting VSM to reduce redundant efforts, which should result in more profits from investments being generated faster, noted Knudsen.
Ideally, organizations should be able to surface business objectives within the context of the tools used to build and deploy applications, noted Knudsen. That approach will enable developers and the DevOps teams that support them to make better business decisions based on the dependencies that might exist between projects, she added. Otherwise, individual team members will make decisions without any understanding how they impact the business at all, said Knudsen.
Unfortunately, that lack of visibility is hard to achieve. The survey finds 85% of decisions are either made at the leadership level, or teams need leadership approval before implementing their decisions. Only 5.8% said decisions are made and implemented at the team level. That dependency on a centralized command and control model for managing application development is a direct result of an inability to collect and share relevant data with the teams working on various elements of a project, noted Knudsen.
In fact, the survey found only 11% of organizations don’t give employees business metrics by which they can achieve or measure products, even though 63% indicated they have metrics.
The more data a DevOps team has the more likely it becomes that the right decision will be made at the right time. Otherwise, factors that are more influenced by inherent biases that stem more from the role of the individual rather than the strategic objectives of the organization will have a bigger impact on how and when decisions are made.
Of course, VSM requires organizations to make investments in platforms capable of capturing and analyzing relevant data. The issue then becomes determining to what degree a VSM platform will provide a return on that investment in a way that results in more business objectives being achieved faster.