Why Seeing the Value Stream Is So Important

hi thanks for coming to watch our why seeing value stream it's so important my name is Hal Holloway and I'll be presenting this short presentation I want to start with looking at how our organizational structure is in most organizations we have a hierarchy you know we have the kind of folks at the top the sea levels then down to the directors and then down to the people doing the work however our work flow is actually quite different from this some idea comes in you know to the organization it gets approved and then it kind of cuts across different parts of the organization you know getting approval at different points as we go but more or less the work flow goes across the organization even though we're managing our people from sort of a top to bottom method now well how does this cause a problem or what not what happens you know and we actually of course have more than just one piece of work flowing so we manage this way kind of from a top-down but our work flow actually goes this way what does this do well let's look at this you know when you're in an article organization people are gonna manage what they see they're gonna look to see how busy their people are that they're managing how what's the productivity what's the quality of the work this is pretty natural because well it's what they're there to do and what they can see but what we really need to manage is the time to market what's the effect of upstream groups in other words before it hits the development team what's the what are the business analysts and the product owners doing to create the requirements or what's the effect of the development work on operations and support but we don't quite see this we do try to manage it but we manage it in an indirect manner because we really don't see this so much so the question is who's managing the value and what happens when we don't main into the value as well as we might so if we take a look at this as we can see what we call the value stream this is if we ignore the organizational structure of the people and we just look at the flow of the work that's what the this call we want time to market of course we wanted to go from the left to the right and we call it the value stream because on the Left there's really no value at all except maybe the concept the idea we have on the right we're actually able to deliver it and by delivering it we can actually achieve the value at that point so it's the value stream because we see value is being added as we do the work but the question is where is our time being spent and in fact our time of course is adding value when it's at a person but there's all this waiting time in between so you add value we wait we add value we wait and I shouldn't say we wait as we know we're busy people are very busy but value is added and then it stops the work flow stops until another person is available to hand it off to so if we chipped from the people to the work flow we see that even though everybody is busy all the people who are managing are quite busy and doing things the work flow itself is starting and stopping and starting and stopping and starting and stopping because people are typically working on more than one thing the question is of course what percentage of our time do we spend working versus waiting how much is the value stream so - so to speak being delayed because people are busy on other things how would we even know what this is and that no one is actually managing this in most companies and this actually turns out to be a real problem because the question is what happens when adding value is delayed what happened when work just stops you know like if there's a long time between getting requirements and using them the requirements can degrade we can actually have to reduce some of the requirements or we build the wrong thing or we have a not as good an understanding as we might like to have if we write a bug and it doesn't get tested for a few weeks and therefore is not detected for a few weeks it takes a lot longer to fix the bug later actually the fixing time is the same it's typically the finding time same thing with integration if they get out of sync and what happens is it takes a lot longer to fix and teams have been known to get into a thrashing or because of these delights so these delays are somewhat insidious because we don't manage them we don't really see them and yet because this additional work and the whole picture is actually quite a bit worse there's not just a couple things going on there's all sorts of stuff going on and actually the more stuff going on the busier people are the more we're managing our people to be quote-unquote productive the more things we have in place and actually in a sense the worst we're making it so we could take a first-order solution and then a lot of ways agile and scrum tends to do this because what we can do they say let's not worry so much about the high level management let's create cross-functional teams that can get the job done and now notice what happens a lot of the waiting just goes away which is good you know we do things in two-week increments or four week increments or whatever you're doing it as and we can actually by having a cross-functional team remove a lot of the handoffs a lot of the delays and this is really good thing but it's only a first order solution it doesn't solve everything it leaves the problems of how do we handle dependencies across the teams it leaves how do we handle product portfolio management which we use there how do we guide the decisions on what to work with and make sure we're load balancing the team's properly so we don't introduce new delays between when we're going to do work and when the team's can pick up the work how do we actually feed the teams this work do we do it where we give the team's what they need and they coordinate it do we give the teams and in a coordinated fashion ourselves and of course how do we best integrate across the team how do we do continuous integration so a lot of things are left out and these actually cause some severe problems in fact on reflection I think you can see what we were what we see happens a lot is that the first order solution results in team level agile being reasonably successful but it doesn't really take a lot of steps toward the enterprise wide agile and this is a lot of what our issues are a lot of what our challenges are so we have all these things that we don't solve with the just the teams going and we need a higher view and that's really the point of this of this talk is that we need a higher view of how to look at the workflow we can't manage it if we don't see it managing it directly is not as powerful as managing it directly now this is just a short webinar stating why we have the problem if you're interested in learning about well what can you do with it now that we see it you know please contact me we have a series of other webinars and talks that actually show how to solve this problem using lean and this is really the nature of our business is how to go beyond you know mere team agile that can be effective while not resulting in enterprise agile that's really what's needed so thanks again for being here and I hope you're listening to me soon or giving me email and so we can chat about what might be helpful for you thanks thanks for watching this lightning webinar brought to you by net objectives we're committed to equipping our clients with effective business driven software development methods so they can be more successful please let us know how we could help you visit us at

Channel: Net Objectives Thoughts

Views: 12,890

Rating: 4.9111109 out of 5

Keywords: lean, agile, scrum, shalloway, value stream, software, Management

Id: EMzaP5VHdyE

Length: 7min 29sec (449 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 19 2013