Learn how value stream management (VSM) can provide visibility into your processes, help you align them to meet your goals, and gain efficiencies at Broadcom’s VSM Virtual Summit on April 24.
A GigaOm research report from 2023 highlighted how VSM plays a critical role in ensuring that going fast and delivering more also delivers a product that actually provides value. The reports spotlights the techniques of value stream that enable value to be seen, mapped to the goals of the business, then optimized by eliminating waste and removing roadblocks to deliver.
“There are more companies that are in the phase of using it with multiple product lines. And there’s more companies that are starting to use it and doing a POC with it,” explained Laureen Knudsen, Broadcom’s Chief Transformation Officer – AOD. “So we’re seeing that growth curve really starting to take off and happen in this past year than we have previously. It’s been snowballing and I think the results are what people are starting to pay attention to at this point.”
Value stream management seems to be following the path of both Agile and DevOps, which began as ways to more effectively build and deliver software and was then adopted and scaled throughout the organization to gain efficiencies and bring more stakeholders into the process.
“A lot of the noise in the market about value stream management really had to do with DevOps,” Knudsen said. “And I think that came from SAFe using value stream mapping in their DevOps course. But a lot of people were only using it in their DevOps processes. And then they realized, well, that’s not where the process starts. And if I’m talking about taking a systems view of how I create products, I need to start at the very beginning of the ideation phase, and move all the way through to ‘How did my customers perceive what I did?’ “
Since Agile development is not a prescriptive way to create software, some organizations are all in while others might only be doing Scrum yet believe they are Agile in their processes.
“Almost everybody today will tell you they’re agile, but whether they’re really following the principles of Agile remains to be seen,” Knudsen said. “A lot of them still don’t have data and transparency, which is fundamental to agility. I’m seeing companies that were taking this seriously, and really trying to fix all of the ills they had when they rolled out DevOps and they rolled out Agile, and it didn’t go very well. There’s a lot of companies that are saying, ‘Okay, we saw what we did before, and it didn’t work very well. And now we really want to get this right.’ And they’re using this to bring the entire organization together, and include everybody who’s involved in that process of product creation, whether it’s a legal approval of an open source product, or marketing, or an agent that has to know about what you’re creating to be able to do their job more fully. So it’s expanding out to reach everybody, and it’s being taken a lot more seriously.”
This year’s fourth iteration of VSM Virtual Summit – “Making Waves” – will feature speakers from Boston-based financial firm State Street Corp., vehicle transaction company Cox Automotive, and energy firm Southern Company, to speak about how value stream management has helped them efficiencies and deliver value to their customers.
Those speakers, as well as Broadcom’s experts, will provide real-world examples of findings that they have, both positive and challenges, and how they’ve overcome those challenges and how they’re solving issues.
Knudsen said value stream management is not the same for organizations. “Everybody’s got slightly different things that they’ve overcome recently, that they end up talking about, but they’re all harnessing the power of that end-to-end view or the value stream management view to optimize their transformations. So that’s our focus at VSM Virtual Summit.”
Register for the April 24 event here, and even if you can’t make it, the event recording will be made available immediately after the Summit for on-demand viewing.