Previously, Rally was only available as a SaaS offering, but this new on-premises version is designed specifically to enable companies that operate globally to plan, prioritize, manage, track, and measure the value they are delivering to customers while still maintaining security and compliance. 

Rally Anywhere provides data sovereignty, meaning that data stays within the physical borders of where it originated, which allows companies to comply with international data protection regulations and alleviate data residency concerns.

It also provides the flexibility and scalability that is necessary for teams that are split up across multiple time zones and geographic locations to work together collaboratively. 

According to Broadcom, with this announcement, the company’s entire ValueOps Value Stream Management Solution is now available as either a SaaS or on-premises option. 

“We are committed to empowering enterprise teams with the tools they need to succeed, and Rally Anywhere exemplifies this commitment. With its focus on enterprise security, data sovereignty, and support for global value streams, we are confident that this new product will be a game-changer for organizations looking to elevate their collaborative efforts while maintaining control and security,” said Serge Lucio, general manager of the Agile Operations Division at Broadcom.

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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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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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According to a recent survey from Broadcom, more than two-thirds of respondents claimed that their visibility isn’t what it should be. In addition, the majority of companies are missing a key characteristic of mature VSM organizations, which is the continuous availability of data. Sixty-nine percent say they share their VSM metrics only quarterly or monthly. Only 9% continuously share data.

Just 2% of respondents to the survey consider themselves to be at a level of VSM maturity, where they are using VSM on all of their products. Sixty percent are in the early adoption stage, 13% are in planning, and 25% have a pilot project. In addition, 23% are only running VSM on a single product. “While organizations acknowledge the significance of VSM, a substantial portion find themselves in the early phases of adoption. This survey indicates a growing interest in ongoing performance improvements and aspiration for holistic, enterprise-wide visibility, alignment and efficiency to increase customer value,” said Jean-Louis Vignaud, head of ValueOps at Broadcom.

The survey also pointed out peoples’ challenges with mapping metrics to value. Sixty-three percent say their metrics aren’t mapped to product performance, and 11% say their companies don’t provide business metrics for measuring products.Decision making still remains largely centralized as well, with 85% of decisions either being made at the leadership level or requiring leadership approval before proceeding. 

To help companies better assess their maturity with VSM, Broadcom has now announced the Value Stream Management Maturity Model, which was created based on the survey results. The model provides insights, guidance, and actionable steps to help companies meet their VSM goals. It includes five levels: Foundational, Value Stream Aware, Collaborative and Visible, Data-Driven, and Full Transparency and Flow. 

“Value stream management has become a pivotal strategy for digital transformation, but success requires that teams understand where they’re at and where they’re going,” said  Vignaud. “To help enterprise teams on their VSM journey, we developed a progressive model that defines maturity from the early stages focused on breaking down silos to full maturity, delineated by data-driven alignment and an established culture of continuous improvement. Our hope is this model will serve as a guide for organizations as they progress along their digital transformation journey.”

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In a blog post announcing the deal, Broadcom said its plan is to integrate ConnectALL with the company’s ValueOps platform, which includes the Rally agile solution and the Clarity project portfolio management tools, to expand Broadcom’s offering for value stream management and digital transformation.

According to Broadcom’s website, “The combination of ValueOps and ConnectALL’s complementary technology will allow customers to connect and integrate a variety of third-party software tools and platforms and accelerate digital transformation efforts by radically improving visibility, alignment, and efficiency across the organization.”

This is an except from an article that was originally posted on VSM Times. Read the full article here.

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Unfortunately, there are a few engineering KPI anti-patterns that reduce the organizations’ ability to understand how their performance relates to business outcomes.

When teams start measuring for the first time, they tend to use those metrics to drive accountability and predictability. But according to Jeremy Freeman, co-founder of value stream intelligence platform provider Allstacks, failing to trace those metrics back into business outcomes is the first of three KPI anti-patterns he discussed in a recent call with SD Times.

The message from executives is that organizations need to be more data-driven, and there are countless metrics that can offer some visibility into the activities and performance of the product development team. “If you’ve not done engineering KPIs before, you might grab the first six or seven that pop up,” Freeman explained. He highlighted metrics like average downtime, churn, and on-time delivery, then warned that engineering leaders often neglect to do the next step: “You don’t actually ever really go back and connect those back to the business value.” And that’s where things get dicey with the business side of the house. Freeman elaborated, “Would the CEO go to the company board and say, ‘we improved our Scrum velocity by 50%?’ Because the board would say, ‘Why do we care? Does that move the needle on our revenue? Does it somehow reduce our costs?’” Engineering leaders often don’t know how to use their data to answer these questions. 

Keep in mind that the engineering team in a lot of organizations is responsible for multiple different outcomes. The team could be responsible for working against a roadmap developed in another part of the business, but also responsible for delivering that software to the user, and ensuring that it’s running and users have a good experience, which impacts the business. “What ends up happening is leaders tend to search for one key metric for engineering performance, and tend to forget that there are multiple outcomes the org is responsible for,” he added. “It’s not just to be the most efficient development organization possible.”

The second anti-pattern Freeman discussed has to do with the term “cargo culting.” He said he has heard the term used to describe people adopting Agile practices for the sake of adopting Agile. “A team will read a bunch of information or hear talks at a conference and say that ‘Agile seems great. And all we’ve got to do is have a standup once a day.’ But they don’t see any of the benefits. They’re pulling in these practices, hoping that they’ll get the benefits, but don’t really understand the connection between actions and outcomes. That ends up actually being a big anti-pattern.” 

In this scenario, engineering KPIs become checkboxes like “What’s our PR cycle time” instead of “Will improving the our PR cycle time improve our organization’s delivery ability?” Without seeking to answer the second question, any measure gets clunky, hindering instead of helping teams achieve efficiency. 

The third anti-pattern? Freeman readily identified “using metrics for evil.” 

The Allstacks CTO explained that as the misuse of data and losing sight of the overarching goal it’s trying to track. “If you are so focused on the metric, it can lead to some really toxic behaviors,” he said. Freeman used the example of an organization’s SLA that requires all bugs to be finished within two weeks. The team might be tempted to put in hasty fixes, or try to skirt the metric by creating a new ticket that resets the clock. “For junior leaders, it can be tempting to tie metrics like that to performance reviews and potentially even compensation or bonuses. If that happens, people are going to get real focused on hitting the metric at the expense of the business objectives and the job that they’re supposed to be doing.”

If people are incentivized to game a metric, Freeman concluded, you’re using metrics incorrectly. “You should be using your KPIs and metrics to point people in the right direction and drive the right behaviors, not punish people for getting off-track.”

Content provided by SD Times and Allstacks

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The new dashboard provides an overall view of metrics like DORA and flow metrics. By tracking these metrics over a period of time, development teams will be able to locate trends early, drill down into individual metrics, take action to improve performance, and track innovation investments. 

And, going up the chain, business leaders can also look at these metrics to eliminate bottlenecks and make decisions like where to add resources to support developers.

Read the full story on VSM Times.

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Software development is a business differentiator that requires strategic investments to improve the bottom line. Having worked in all aspects of the software development lifecycle, I know most people in the industry think in terms of two types of deliverables – creating new features and fixing bugs. In reality, that’s too limiting. I hear management complain that developer productivity is down simply because developers are responsible for what appears to be everything now and may spend less than 50% of their time writing code. The amount of time a developer has available for coding is tracked, but many other activities are hidden and considered “tax” of the organization, like caretaking the pipeline, fixing problems with your environment and helping testers.

Developers want to write code. The business wants them to write code. Customers want the solutions their code provides. That means we need to understand where developer time is actually being spent and give them an opportunity to write code for time-consuming manual activities that can be automated. 

Four fundamental development categories  

For product management to be effective, four types of work need to be visible, supported, and funded. 

Features. Delivering cutting-edge features is the fun part of a developer’s job. Creativity takes time and delighting customers isn’t easy in highly-competitive markets. Resources need to be invested in developing new or improved functionality, usability, flexibility, and other customer-friendly features. 

Defects. I’ve heard it said that today’s features are tomorrow’s bugs. Fixing defects, bugs, and other issues is a routine part of software development. Releases often go out with bugs, so your team may be putting out fires related to your releases and those of your vendors and partners. Identifying and eliminating problems that hurt the customer experience is important, but they need to be weighed against other priorities. 

Risk. Risk-related activities represent the majority of the hidden work that developers do. Improving the software engine to produce more reliably involves setting up guardrails and security for better deployment. DevOps practices push for complete automation of manual checklists that have been used to validate items, including whitesource library checks, open source license validation, testing, deployments, and code analysis. Developers WANT to automate them, and implementing code that does the checks is fun. 

Technical debt. As soon as something is built, the need for modernization is a possibility as the world changes. The technology gap between modern standards and legacy systems grows over time, so it’s important to regularly assess the tradeoffs between investing in patches or updates and rethinking the design given new learnings and needs. This includes build vs buy decisions. 

Balancing development work investments

Peter Hyde of Gartner defines a work profile as, “The proportion of each type of work item delivered in a time period by the software value stream.” Too much focus on one area can throw the organization out of balance, making it harder to deliver customer value. For example, if too much time is focused on features/defects, you’ll end up with a fragile development environment straddled with technical debt, ultimately killing its ability to deliver new features.

Start by identifying the percentage of your resources going into adding features, fixing defects, reducing risk, and addressing technical debt to understand your current work profile, which is also known as your work distribution. This may take some digging if visibility is lacking, especially if everything is currently being categorized under features or defects. This will give you a baseline for analysis and allocation of future spending, which is based on your goals. 

If the goal is to make significant future investments into sets of components, continual modernization of the technology base (technical debt) and refinement of the software delivery engine (risk) will reduce the overall “cost” and time of delivering new features or fixing bugs. Investments into risk may also increase the ability to obtain certifications, improve agility to react to outages, reduce MTTR, and boost customer trust.  

Ultimately the team, typically driven by product, must make tradeoffs with the limited resources they have. The team needs a way to tradeoff investing into better security automation vs improving the technology stack vs just adding features and fixing bugs.

Connecting value stream management and outcome mapping 

Outcomes are the core of delivering value to the customer, and every outcome can be supported by one of the four types of work. Teams should think hard about the outcomes they are working towards. They need to clarify why items are important, identify obstacles, explore how to learn more, and identify how to measure progress towards the outcomes. 

The work of product management is central to translating the outcomes into the core work types. Ultimately they are responsible for justifying and defending investment decisions.  Value stream management helps in this journey by providing the data and associated visualizations connected to outcomes.

Investment strategy advice

Balancing work is essential to effective product management. Start with your outcomes, but communicate in terms of the work distribution. You know the strategy you’re trying to accomplish from a business perspective. Translate that for your individual product managers, so they can connect those business outcomes to actual work that has to get done. 

To keep everyone on the same page, train your executive team on how to translate outcomes to the work profiles, and proactively sell why the tradeoffs were made in the first place between the various types of work. Finding the right balance will make a developer’s job more enjoyable while also improving customer value.

The post Beyond features and bugs: Expanding how to evaluate development investments appeared first on SD Times.

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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“There’s nothing wrong with value stream management itself, but there’s plenty wrong with how it’s being considered and discussed by others, who often conflate it with either Agile or value management,” said Andrew Fuqua, SVP of Products at ConnectALL in the SD Times Live! webinar, You’ve Heard What Value Stream Management Isn’t. Now Hear the Truth About What It Is. “They’re not the same thing.”

The definition of value stream has been around for a very long time and it encompasses value-added and non-value-added activities that are required to take products or services from raw materials to the waiting arms of the customer, according to Lance Knight, president and COO at ConnectALL. At the high level of software development, this is the idea, planning, building, testing, and deploying.

To continue, read the original article on VSM Times.

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