Brian Muskoff, director of DevOps strategy at HCL Technologies, IT and digital solutions provider 
We believe value stream management is an everyday solution to improve collaboration, delivery flow and business results. With HCL UrbanCode Velocity, teams can immediately change the nature of their Agile + DevOps practices with our value stream visualization that we call Dots. This real-time, end-to-end view enables teams to quickly answer many questions, like what are our bottlenecks, are we on track, and what should we work on next? Stand-ups, playbacks and retrospectives will take on a new, better shape.

At the portfolio level, our insights capability provides metrics focused on speed, security and quality over time. Identify your high-performing teams, what they are doing differently, and how can you lift up lower-performing teams. You can’t manage what you don’t measure and we make it easy by tapping into the data from your existing tools and creating relationships from end-to-end.

Beyond visibility, HCL UrbanCode Velocity enables teams to take action through pipeline aggregation and release orchestration. It streamlines your delivery process by going over the top of CI/CD automation tooling while enabling automated governance. With a few clicks, it’s easy to generate audit reports or establish gates based on policy definitions.

RELATED CONTENT: Getting the most value out of your value streams

Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop, a software tool integration company
Value streams begin and end with customers, but what happens in between is often a mystery. That’s where Tasktop comes in. Tasktop products and services are primarily focused on flow, which is essential to value stream optimization and management. To understand value stream flow, the teams that plan, build, deliver and support software need a single source of truth into the flow of events, from the earliest stages of product ideation through production — including customer feedback. While a product life cycle seems like a continuous flow conceptually, Tasktop reveals the otherwise hidden wait-states that interfere with value delivery.
Value Stream Management is not just about delivering value faster, it’s about protecting business value by helping IT work collaboratively with the business so they can be more responsive to the market and disruption. Tasktop helps customers navigate this with products and services that provide visibility into how business value flows across product value streams to meet business outcomes. Using Flow Metrics, global enterprises can measure what matters (in real-time) to move to a product-centric operating model that changes perception of IT as a set of projects working as a cost center to a continuous profit generator that truly helps them transform.

Jeff Keyes, director of product marketing at value stream management platform provider Plutora
Plutora offers a full-stack VSM solution for the enterprise. Its integrations alleviate the need to acquire an entire prescriptive toolchain to perform useful, actionable intelligence to software management. And Plutora is tool agnostic, providing the ability to deliver software with any tool of choice.

Plutora has built a management system for the software delivery process – appropriate for all types of development methodologies and proven at enterprise scale. This approach enables the solution to extend from agile management, discovery and design through to delivery and production. Because of that, Plutora customers benefit from how seamless the VSM platform is across the entire toolchain — all while providing them with an unmatched advantage.

Lance Knight, chief operating officer at ConnectALL, a value stream integration company
We help enterprises of all sizes connect, visualize, and measure software delivery value streams. We connect, integrate, and capture data from all the tools in your software delivery value stream. Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of tools specifically in the DevOps space, including tools on the right side of your value stream: The tools that verify, package, secure, release, configure and monitor a company’s software.

In order to optimize the value stream more effectively and capture data from this explosion of tools, ConnectALL has recently announced its Universal Adapter that will connect to any solution or tool you use as part of your software delivery value stream, even the ones that haven’t been created yet!

This ability allows our customers to automate and amplify feedback loops from their DevOps tools to their agile team backlogs. The new Universal Adapter allows ConnectALL to be your value stream control center and helps manage the flow of work through your software delivery organization. ConnectALL can see a developer complete a user story in your planning tool, and at that point, ConnectALL can instruct your code verification tool to analyze the code that was just submitted to it and return details back to your planning tool of any discovered issues. So not only can ConnectALL integrate all the artifacts of decisions like user stories and defects, it can manage the flow of information through your organization, improving velocity and agility.
Of course, there are analytics and metrics on top of that as well, and we allow you to capture your analytics so you can isolate areas of waste.

Eric Robertson, VP of product marketing and management at CollabNet VersionOne, an Agile planning, DevOps and VSM software provider
We are very unique in this space. There are other vendors that come in from different types of spaces. You have vendors from the traditional Agile planning side, project portfolio management, traditional ARA, CD and more. But because we have merged together with VersionOne, we bring a lot of those tools and aspects together under our platform.

Together, we have the capability to do value stream mapping and value stream integration. We have a full enterprise planning and delivery toolset to help users with their enterprise planning up to the strategic teams and portfolio level, and down to when you start breaking down into features, epics and planning.

The differentiation that we have that is different from a lot of the other tools is a lot of the CD tools don’t have a planning tool. They have to connect to one. They are very dependent on that. We have native capabilities around that, and on the delivery side we have native capabilities that allows us to connect and monitor that delivery pipeline.

We have the capability to bring in that data from that right-hand side and map it directly to my strategic themes and objectives and key results that drive business outcomes. We can actually show you that. We can map it full end-to-end. That is our unique value proposition.