How Value Stream Management accelerates the delivery of value to your customers?
Value Stream Management can help your enterprise strategise for greater efficiency to deliver optimum value for your customers. This focus puts your customer first to increase satisfaction and business growth.
There are two types of value streams: developmental and operational
Development value streams are the sequence of activities required to convert a business hypothesis into a digitally enabled solution. Examples could include designing a new financial or booking app.
On the other hand, operational value streams represent the flow of business. They ensure that value can be delivered to the end customer efficiently and indefinitely. It’s the starting point for aligning your business operations against measurable objectives and results.
This transformation will apply across your entire system, including your divisions, functional departments, suppliers and channels.
Both of these should create value for a customer and optimise the delivery of that value from end-to-end, whether that is an external customer or an internal stakeholder. Reducing time to market is just one example of how you can achieve accelerated value.
The value stream concept delivers greater value by achieving the following business outcomes:
• Enable long-lived, stable teams that focus on delivering value
• Identify and visualise all the work necessary to produce solutions
• Identify delays, bottlenecks, and handoffs
• Enable knowledge growth and more continuous learning
• Simplify funding models
• Help eliminate the siloed organisation
In this article, we’re reviewing each of these outcomes in more detail to help you visualise how each of these elements brings value to your enterprise.
Enable long-lived, stable teams that focus on delivering value
With value stream management, you remodel your funding so that you fund a team rather than the lifetime of the product. Everything is designed to deliver value. If it’s not doing that, then it is surplus to requirements and can be removed from your business budgets, plans and roadmaps.
Identify and visualise all the work necessary to produce solutions
These are all the activities required to deliver the service to customers. These are operational products in your strategy that define how to get from A to B, such as the steps listed below:
• Flight search
• Price flight
• Book flight
• Process payment
• Ticketing
• Check-in
• Baggage handling
Your next task is to organise your company so that these products can be delivered in the most efficient way and in a way that brings the most value to the customer. This is known as a “developmental” value stream.
Help to eliminate the siloed organisation
For complex organisations and enterprises, you need some way to keep everybody on the same page. When you let silos develop, there’s no organisation-wide view of what’s going on. It’s not uncommon for enterprises to have groups of experts separated by department, specialisation or location. Departmental problems can arise when team leaders or managers pursue departmental goals instead of company goals.
Simplify the funding model
Fund the people that are responsible for delivering value to the business rather than the specific outcomes they will produce. This will save your enterprise significant management time.
Identify delays, bottlenecks and handoffs
This mapping style makes it easier to identify delays and bottlenecks. These are common barriers to time-to-market inefficiencies. It helps you to prioritise the bottlenecks that actually matter so that the organisation can focus on reducing that delay to the benefit of everyone, especially customers.
Conclusion
Having clear value streams helps to point everyone towards the same goal with a structure that’s driven by value.
Value streams can deliver better value for your business, but they need to be implemented in the right way. It’s crucial to strategise and implement any digital transformation in the right way. Some aspects can take on a more generic outline for your business sector. Pairing up the operational and developmental aspects will require careful consideration and planning.
There are several software solutions that can help you develop strategic maps. These include Clarity and Rally by Broadcom. Combined as a software set, this is known as ValueOps. There is no out-of-the-box solution, and Ignite Technology can offer advice to help you implement these innovative solutions in a way that will be most effective for your enterprise.
Our ValueOps PPM consultants can help bring clarity to these areas of your business. Contact us today to schedule your demo of Clarity or Rally in action.
