Who designs your value stream?
Photo by Joe Coyle
As businesses seek to look for ways to cut costs and improve their speed to market, many are examining their technology processes. Organizational design, employee skills, and even application architectures contribute to unnecessary handoffs or approvals, duplication of effort, and waiting throughout the overall delivery process. However, looking only at the IT portion of the value stream may result in bottlenecks in other areas.
This week Jim York led a great virtual session on Collapsing the Value Stream for the Agile NOVA meetup. He recommended starting with the customer need and looking at the whole system to consider what happens all the way through to post-delivery support. The goal is to see the flow of value through the organization and effect changes to optimize that flow. Jim raised the question of “who designs your value stream?” and was met with initial silence from the group.
Scrum enables teams to work from product backlogs that are full of ideas—ideas that are potentially valuable for the organization and their customers—and deliver working increments in one- to four-week cycles. Organizations find initial benefits in adopting Scrum for this reason and yet struggle with speed, quality, and value later.
Delivering a usable product into the hands of customers earlier allows an organization to capture more value, which is why many Product Managers consider opportunity costs when prioritizing features. Seeing working product delivered every sprint can be exciting or satisfying, and we may lose sight of the value outcomes we ultimately desire.
It is only when customers are using the delivered product that we can validate if what was developed truly created value. I find this is validation-information is often disconnected from development teams and even Product Managers in larger organizations.
In most companies, a Scrum team or group of Scrum teams are only one part of the larger value stream and may or may not understand the customer need(s) they are satisfying. To see bigger gains from agile methods, the organizational design of the teams, the application architecture, and development team skills can be reviewed to identify opportunities to restructure cross-functional teams around products and introduce scaling practices as needed. The overall flow of value through the organization can be evaluated and optimized across departments to better serve customers.
Who is designing your value streams—your leaders or your organization’s history?
