The idea of improving the creation and delivery of value to customers and the organization itself has come to be described by any number of terms in the industry: value stream management, developer productivity and observability, flow management and – at Broadcom, ValueOps (its value stream management solution).

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