Topic: Value Streams

Relation of Value Stream Management and SAFe® – Agility Planning

Safe Business Agility

Defining and effectively managing value streams can translate to satisfied customers and competitive advantage in an organization. But what is value stream management and how does it relate to SAFe? In this episode, Richard Knaster and Marc Rix continue their conversation about why value stream management is important for effective business agility in an organization, and how it can help organizations succeed in the digital age.

Click the “Subscribe” button to subscribe to the SAFe Business Agility podcast on Apple Podcasts

Subscribe

Share:

Defining and effectively managing value streams can translate to satisfied customers and competitive advantage. But what is value stream management and how does it relate to SAFe? In this episode, Richard Knaster and Marc Rix continue their conversation about why value stream management is important, and how it can help organizations succeed in the digital age.

In part two of their deep-dive, Marc and Richard discuss elements including:

  • What value stream management means in different contexts
  • Value stream management in the real world: two stories from the field

Follow these links to learn more about topics mentioned in the podcast:

Hosted by: Melissa Reeve

Melissa Reeve is the Vice President of Marketing at Scaled Agile

Melissa Reeve is the Vice President of Marketing at Scaled Agile, Inc. In this role, Melissa guides the marketing team, helping people better understand Scaled Agile, the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), and its mission. Connect with Melissa on LinkedIn.

Guest: Richard Knaster

Richard Knaster is a SAFe Fellow and vice president

Richard is a SAFe Fellow and vice president and chief scientist at Digital AI, as well as a former Scaled Agile employee and methodologist. He’s also the author of the SAFe Distilled book series and the ebook, Value Stream Management for the Digital Age. Richard has led large-scale Agile transformations for more than 15 years and is passionate about helping organizations create a better environment to deliver value. Connect with Richard on LinkedIn.

Guest: Marc Rix

SAFe Fellow and principal consultant at Scaled Agile

A SAFe Fellow and principal consultant at Scaled Agile, Marc helps large enterprises leverage the game-changing power of Lean, Agile, and DevOps at scale. He has over 20 years of experience applying Lean-Agile methods to improve value streams in organizations of all sizes and industries. Marc is also an entrepreneur and internationally recognized thought leader, consultant, trainer, adviser, and speaker. Find Marc on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Speaker 1:

Looking for the latest news, experiences, and answers to questions about SAFe? You’ve come to the right place. This podcast is for you, the SAFe community of practitioners, trainers, users, and everyone who engages SAFe on a daily basis.

Melissa Reeve:

Welcome to the SAFe Business Agility podcast recorded from our homes around the world. I’m Melissa Reeve, your host for today’s episode.

Melissa Reeve:

This is part two of our series on value stream management featuring Richard Knaster and Marc Rix. Richard is a SAFe Fellow and vice president and chief scientist at Digital.ai, and Marc Rix is a SAFe Fellow and principal consultant here at Scaled Agile. Thanks for joining me for this second episode. It’s great to have you back on the show.

Marc Rix:

Thanks a lot, Melissa. I’m very excited to be here.

Richard Knaster:

Thank you, Melissa. It’s great to be here.

Melissa Reeve:

Let’s get started.

Melissa Reeve:

So, for our listeners, I want to break a few of these things down, because I feel like we’ve done a pretty good job identifying in an overarching way what a value stream is, right? It’s the people, the processes, the information, and the tools that are essential to creating and delivering value. And that’s kind of the macro concept. Then we also talked about value stream identification. So what are the products and the services? What is that value that you’re delivering to the customer? We also talked about mapping your value streams. So what are those steps that you need to do to deliver value to the customer? How can you Lean out those steps so that you can identify the waste and make sure that you’ve got the flow flowing through your value streams? And then, we’ve now talked about value stream management, which is that monitoring and the traceability all around these value streams that you’ve identified. And that’s my understanding based on our conversation today. Richard, did I get that right?

Richard Knaster:

I’m talking about the optimization of people, processes, and technology to optimize the flow of value from concept all the way through cash, or from idea to production. And there are a bunch of different processes I’m thinking that are involved in each of those three areas. So very similar to what Marc was mentioning. And this is very nascent, so there are definitely competing definitions of what value stream management means.

Melissa Reeve:

And that’s what I’m sensing here is that it is relatively new and yet it’s a big buzzword. So, I think for our listeners, it’s helpful to hear these different points of view about what VSM or value stream management means to different folks.

Richard Knaster:

Yeah. And the problem too is that the acronym VSM, does that mean value stream management? Or does that mean value stream mapping? So that often gets us into quite a bit of trouble as well.

Melissa Reeve:

I can see that. So Richard, what does all this look like in the real world? Can you share an experience you’ve had in the field helping an organization transition to value streams and value stream management?

Richard Knaster:

Yeah. So, I’m going to talk about a case in the federal government, because if you can do value stream management in the federal government, then you can do it anywhere. When we started with this agency, they were still managing work in projects. And they had many different groups in that organization, and they were separately funded. And one of the first things that we had to do was to bring the funding together for that agency. And that agency included a lot of subgroups or departments or divisions within that agency. So, the first thing we had to get alignment on was that we were going to change the way we work and that we were going to be implementing value stream management. And then to start thinking, in what I call it, a one-portfolio mindset. Because everyone was doing these separate projects and often there was redundancy between one division and another division of that same agency. And we only have one pot of money to spend. So it’s not like we can get more money if we need it.

So, we really had to then start … So, we started at the portfolio with this particular agency because we felt it was important to get alignment on, what is the really important thing that we wanted this agency to work on? What are going to be the large epics that they’re working on? And then for us, it was pretty easy to identify the value streams there because the different divisions of that agency just happened to fall into place; they were essentially the value streams that this agency provided. So the areas were the services that that agency provided. So, we were able to do that.

And so, I’m finding more and more that I’m starting with Lean Portfolio Management when it comes to implementing value streams, because of having to go from projects to value streams and changing the funding mechanisms, as well as getting alignment about the large initiatives that those value streams are going to implement, and then ensuring that we’re organized for value. So, doing the identification and the mapping.

Melissa Reeve:

Yeah. I can see how starting with LPM and getting your funding mechanisms organized around value streams helps then once you identify your value streams and you start to move forward with them. So thanks for sharing that example.

Richard Knaster:

Sure.

Melissa Reeve:

So Marc, how about you? Do you have a real-world example that you can share with our listeners?

Marc Rix:

Sure. Richard’s story actually triggers an experience I had with a government contractor a couple of years ago. Had a really breakthrough moment that will probably stick with me for the rest of my career. But it was very directly related to Value Stream Management and organizing around value and DevOps and value stream mapping. This was a great moment.

So, I was actually teaching the SAFe® DevOps class to a full Agile Release Train, which I’ve had the opportunity to do a few times, but certainly not enough times. It’s always great when you can get an entire Agile Release Train, all of the teams, all of the business owners, and even people from other walks of life who were adjacent to the ARTs, all in a room together learning and talking about value streams.

So, as you may know, there’s a significant amount of value stream mapping we do in the SAFe® DevOps course, which brought everybody kind of onto the same page about what the value streams are. What we quickly realized in the process was that every one of the teams in the room had a different idea of what the value stream actually was. After everybody did their thing and mapped what they thought the value stream was, we had to kind of pause and reflect on what was happening in the room. And what we did on the fly was re-engineer the course to do more of a deep dive into value stream identification and value stream mapping, making sure that we could get all of the teams and everybody on the ART aligned on what the true value stream was.

So we sort of reconfigured the class and reconfigured our objectives and brought the teams together to really think through what the actual value stream was. And that took the dynamic of the course from a team-by-team perspective and split out into teams and do independent work into more of a collective, full-group activity on identifying value streams. This got everybody on the ART involved in identifying the value stream and then mapping it together.

So to kind of shorten the story, where we ended the day was with a renewed understanding of the actual current state value stream in this organization. So now everybody had alignment where there wasn’t alignment before on the actual value stream, because, as we probably know, a lot of times there’s a documented process that’s actually not followed by anybody. This brought everybody onto the same page about the actual delivery process. And then got them aligned on what the value stream should be. So, we did some future-state design work on the value stream and identified the major bottlenecks and what needed to change to increase flow and improve the value stream for this organization with everybody who needed to be involved in the room that day. So it was a big breakthrough moment.

And I’ve had moments like this in other cases too, with other clients and other verticals, other industries either at this larger scale or smaller scale. But I think the lesson to be learned here through all of these experiences I’ve had in the field with doing some form of Value Stream Management or mapping or identification, is great things happen when people take a systems point of view and come together to talk about the entire process end-to-end, not just a segment of it.

So, when you can get stakeholders and practitioners and leaders and sponsors from across the organization talking about a customer-centric point of view of the value stream, not just how we move work from department to department, but what we do to deliver value to our end customers and businesses, great things start to happen. Great conversations start to be sparked. And the team swarms together. And the organization swarms together on redefining those value streams where they need to, sometimes even reorganizing on the fly around that value and creating a situation where they’re now prepared to execute their value streams in a way that their businesses need them to execute their value streams.

Melissa Reeve:

Yeah. I really appreciate that example, Marc, because I think there are times when value streams may be obvious. And then there are these other moments where the value streams aren’t as obvious and it requires some discussion, some internal alignment. And I thank you both for talking about value stream management with me today and how it can be such a game-changer for organizations and their digital transformations.

Thanks for being on the show today.

Richard Knaster:

Thanks for having us, Melissa.

Marc Rix:

This is definitely one of my favorite subjects, so thank you, Melissa, for having me.

Melissa Reeve:

And thanks for listening to our show today. Be sure to check out the show notes and more at scaledagile.com/podcast. Revisit past topics at scaledagile.com/podcast.

Speaker 1:

Relentless improvement is in our DNA and we welcome your input on how we can improve the show. Drop us a line at podcast@scaledagile.com.

CVS Health Tackles COVID Response by Adopting SAFe – SAFe for Healthcare

When empowerment and urgency come together, anything is possible.

Share:

Join four Agile leaders from CVS Health to learn how they banded together to form teams out of existing trains in order to tackle their monumental, and ever-evolving COVID response with the help of SAFe.

What does it look like when all roles across an operational value stream truly come together without the usual complexity and roadblocks that come with being in a large organization? How did they show up, lead with heart, and truly live their values? And what lessons were learned that other organizations can take away from this extraordinary experience?

“Having scaled Agile in place already prior to this happening helps create a lot of clarity and transparency on where we should identify people who already had all the skill sets that we needed to really achieve this. And then it set up like a common language to talk about things like priority and how to sequence work. And honestly just really live the values of SAFe even more so than the process of SAFe which I think is just a beautiful place to be.”

Presented at the 2021 Global SAFe Summit, October 2021 by:

  • Caitlin Clifford, Senior Director of Digital Health Services /CVS Health
  • Rebecca Davis, CVS Health Digital Lean Agile Practice Leader /CVS Health
  • Matthew Huang, Senior Product Manager of Immunizations /CVS Health
  • Randy Kendel, Release Train Engineer of Immunizations /CVS Health
  • Interviewer: Michael Clarkin, CMO, Scaled Agile Inc.

Back to: Customer Stories

Explore more Customer Stories

Next: TV Globo Customer Story

Learn more about TV Globo

TV Globo – Adopting SAFe for Enterprise Agility Transformation

How Enterprise Agility Is Transforming the Largest Media Company in Latin America

Share:

TV Globo is Brazil’s largest TV network serving 100 million viewers in 130 countries.

Like many other media companies, Globo needed to accelerate its digital transformation journey. Their waterfall project approach did not support the speed that was needed to meet this challenge. They needed an Agile approach! But how do you implement Agile in a highly complex environment with hundreds of legacy solutions and a silo-based culture?

Both culture and technology had to be transformed. After some small Agile initiatives, TV Globo decided to adopt SAFe. They started bottom-up. The IT Director sponsored their first implementation of SAFe in two main business areas: Commercial and Content Production. The results after the first year of SAFe implementation were impressive. Leaving behind their “who is right” or “who is guilty” approach, business and technology areas were able to work more closely with a value-driven approach. The empowerment and engagement that resulted from aligning business and tech around the same purpose and company priorities resulted in significant improvements:

  • 20% cost reduction
  • 24% improvement in employee engagement
  • 86% improvement in customer satisfaction

Inspired by these early results, Globo expanded its practice of SAFe. New Value Streams were implemented in other areas, this time sponsored by the C-level, and Globo is designing its roadmap to expand the implementation throughout the company. It has been an exciting, challenging, and rewarding journey so far!

Presented at the 2021 Global SAFe Summit, October 2021 by:

  • Luciana Povoa, Head of Content Production Solutions /Globo

Back to: Customer Stories

Explore more Customer Stories

Next: Deutsche Telekom Customer Story

Learn more about Deutsche Telekom

Deutsche Telekom: Mission Possible – Story of a Successful SAFe Journey

The Ongoing Story of SAFe at a Major European Telco

Share:

Deutsche Telekom is one of the world’s leading integrated telecommunications companies, with some 242 million mobile customers, 27 million fixed-network lines, and 22 million broadband lines.

Deutsche Telekom IT has moved from 0 to 130 ARTs in less than three years. Now a new phase is beginning. Here, alignment, consolidation, and relentless improvement take center stage. In this session, Agile coaches Richard Butler and Manfred Becking take you on this SAFe journey of highs and lows, what helped or hindered them, and what they learned along the way. Topics include:

  • The results to date around collaboration, speed, transparency, and focus
  • Going forward: fusing and consolidating
  • Transformation learnings:
    • Understanding and Cognition
    • Growing realization of things that need to be done
    • Relativity
    • No speed fits all
    • Need for KnowYou can’t travel to the stars SAFely unless you know how It’s a complex and unique universe – things don’t fit together by chance.
    • Mindset – Agile behavior doesn’t just happen
  • Black Holes:
    • Methodology Disconnects
    • “Resilofication” will occur without alignment
    • No Value-Stream, No Agility
    • If it’s not E2E there won’t be smooth flow
    • Inertia – Where the inertia is the highest, so is the gravity
    • Mirage – You might call it SAFe but it doesn’t mean that it is SAFe
    • It’s the Mindset
    • Linear solutions don’t solve dynamically complex problems

Presented at the 2021 Global SAFe Summit, October 2021 by:

  • Manfred Becking, Agile Coach, SAFe Consultant /Deutsche Telekom
  • Richard Butler, Agile Coach, SAFe Consultant /Deutsche Telekom

Back to: Customer Stories

Explore more Customer Stories

Next: Porsche Customer Story

Learn more about Porsche

Value Stream Management in SAFe® – Agility in Business

Safe Business Agility

Defining and effectively managing value streams can translate to satisfied customers and competitive advantage. But what is value stream management and how does it relate to SAFe in an organization for successful business agility transformation? In this episode, Richard Knaster, SAFe Fellow and vice president and chief scientist at Digital AI, and Marc Rix, SAFe Fellow and principal consultant at Scaled Agile explain what value stream management is, and why it’s important, and how it can help organizations succeed in the digital age.

Click the “Subscribe” button to subscribe to the SAFe Business Agility podcast on Apple Podcasts

Subscribe

Share:

Defining and effectively managing value streams can translate to satisfied customers and competitive advantage. But what is value stream management and how does it relate to SAFe? In this episode, Richard Knaster, SAFe Fellow and vice president and chief scientist at Digital AI, and Marc Rix, SAFe Fellow and principal consultant at Scaled Agile, explain what value stream management is, why it’s important, and how it can help organizations succeed in the digital age.

Melissa, Marc, and Richard discuss elements including:

  • Defining a value stream
  • Why value stream management is critical
  • How an organization can get started with value stream management

Follow these links to learn more about topics mentioned in the podcast:

Hosted by: Melissa Reeve

Melissa Reeve is the Vice President of Marketing at Scaled Agile

Melissa Reeve is the Vice President of Marketing at Scaled Agile, Inc. In this role, Melissa guides the marketing team, helping people better understand Scaled Agile, the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), and its mission. Connect with Melissa on LinkedIn.

Guest: Richard Knaster

Richard is a SAFe Fellow and vice president and chief scientist at Digital AI

Richard is a SAFe Fellow and vice president and chief scientist at Digital AI, as well as a former Scaled Agile employee and methodologist. He’s also the author of the SAFe Distilled book series and the ebook, Value Stream Management for the Digital Age. Richard has led large-scale Agile transformations for more than 15 years and is passionate about helping organizations create a better environment to deliver value. Connect with Richard on LinkedIn.

Guest: Marc Rix

SAFe Fellow and principal consultant at Scaled Agile

A SAFe Fellow and principal consultant at Scaled Agile, Marc helps large enterprises leverage the game-changing power of Lean, Agile, and DevOps at scale. He has over 20 years of experience applying Lean-Agile methods to improve value streams in organizations of all sizes and industries. Marc is also an entrepreneur and internationally recognized thought leader, consultant, trainer, adviser, and speaker. Find Marc on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Speaker 1:

Looking for the latest news, experiences, and answers to questions about SAFe®? You’ve come to the right place. This podcast is for you, the SAFe community of practitioners, trainers, users, and everyone who engages SAFe on a daily basis.

Melissa Reeve:

Welcome to the SAFe Business Agility podcast recorded from our homes around the world. I’m Melissa Reeve, your host for today’s episode. Today is the first of a two-part series on value stream management. I have two guests joining me today, Richard Knaster, SAFe Fellow and vice president and chief scientist at Digital.ai, and Marc Rix, SAFe Fellow and principal consultant here at Scaled Agile. Thanks for joining me on the show today. It’s great to have you both here.

Marc Rix:

Thanks a lot, Melissa. I’m very excited to be here.

Richard Knaster:

Thank you, Melissa. It’s great to be here.

Melissa Reeve: So, in this episode, Marc and Richard discuss value stream management, explaining what it is and why it’s important, as well as how it can help organizations succeed in the digital age. Let’s get started.

Speaker 1:

Value stream mapping as a practice is believed to have originated at Toyota as a “Materials and Information Flow diagram”—and became a foundation of the Toyota Production System. Other records indicate that diagrams showing the flow of materials and information date back to a 1915 book called “Installing Efficiency Methods.”

By the 1990s, value stream mapping was extremely popular, and the practice quickly spread from manufacturing into areas including IT operations, marketing, and software development. For more value stream history, visit the show notes for this episode at scaledagile.com/podcast.

Melissa Reeve:

So, Richard, value streams can sometimes mean different things to different people. How do you define a value stream?

Richard Knaster: Yeah. So a value stream is simply the series of interconnected processes that you need to deliver a product or service to a customer. And value streams also contain the people who do the work, the information, and the tools that are necessary for creating value. And there are two types of value streams. There are operational value streams, which sell a product or a solution to a customer. And there are development value streams that are used to develop the solutions used by the operational value streams.

Melissa Reeve:

Thanks for that. Why do you think organizations are focusing on value streams at this point in time?

Richard Knaster:

From what I can see, organizations who have adopted Agile and DevOps, they’re finding that it’s not enough. They’re not getting the full benefits of their Agile transformations. So even though they’ve implemented Agile and they’ve implemented DevOps, most organizations are still releasing less than monthly. So how agile is that if you’re releasing just, you know, less than monthly?

And the other problem that we see is that, for example, if you’re using a scaling framework like SAFe, you can’t get the full benefits of the Framework without value stream management. You need to be able to connect things from left to right, have that visibility across teams, data, and tools. Otherwise, you still have silos. When we apply value stream management, we’re focused on improving flow, whereas projects focus on completing tasks. And that’s a big difference between the two.

Today, we really want to focus on delivering more value instead of just becoming a feature factory, where we deliver lots of features, but we’re not even sure whether or not those features actually deliver business value. So, I think we have to stop the obsession on speed and really focus on delivering more value, even if that means that our velocity of delivery is slightly slower. Because the more important thing is getting that value.

And a lot of transformations fail because organizations haven’t defined what value means in their org, or they don’t focus enough on improving the flow of value and eliminating bottlenecks, handoffs, and also the way they organize people in the value stream. And the other big cause is that there’s a lack of alignment between strategy and execution. So, for me, the way I define value stream management is it also includes managing a portfolio of value streams.

Melissa Reeve:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, we’ve really got to focus on those outcomes and the value that we’re delivering to the customer over the outputs. And you can only do that when you’re thinking about the organization holistically, rather than thinking about one section of the organization. So, I get what you’re saying there, and thanks for sharing that.

So Marc, why don’t you talk to us about value stream management and why it’s so critical.

Marc Rix:

Sure. So I share a lot of Richard’s views, and I think he hit the nail on the head when he pointed out the fact that it’s really all about value here. And enterprises everywhere are still struggling with delivering on time, delivering at the right cadence, getting to market effectively. Whether they’re delivering on Agile initiatives or traditional projects, I think there’s still a lot of struggle in the industry around getting products to market as quickly as possible and efficiently as possible. But the game is changing a little bit.

So I think we need to definitely focus on value over speed. And there’s a reason we need to do that. And to understand that reason, I think we need to have a look at the environment, the market, the global economy and what’s happening there that’s creating the need to deliver value and to focus on value.

I’d like to go to a report that I know that Richard is familiar with. It’s getting a lot of press. It’s been getting a lot of circulation this year. And it’s the Gartner study from about this time last year, October of 2020, where they state that by the year 2023, 70 percent of organizations everywhere are going to be using value stream management. So, to me, that represents a huge amount of adoption of value stream management concepts in a very short amount of time. So something’s got to be driving that.

And what I read into that is, now more than ever, every business is a technology business, and no longer is there any hiding from that fact. No more do we have technology divisions or separate departments. It’s really the whole company that comes into focus when we talk about value delivery and how we get products to market. So now more than ever before, the whole company needs to know how to deliver on products and services, which are increasingly digitally enabled.

And this forces a bit of a change in how value streams have been traditionally defined and executed. It forces value streams to be more crosscutting. Crosscutting not only the technology teams but more of the enterprise: finance, marketing, legal, procurement, other areas, internal and external suppliers. Value streams are getting more complex as companies think about how to win in today’s marketplace. And to win really means to deliver that value.

But this change in value streams is introducing many complexities. You know, how do we cross departments? And how do we cross functions in teams and manage handoffs and dependencies? It’s been a challenge for a long time. But now more than ever we’ve got to be able to move through those bottlenecks and reconcile those differences. And that’s the purpose of VSM. It’s really to bring that process under control and to bring order to that chaos. The benefits there, of course, are reduced operational costs and faster time-to-market, and better business outcomes, as you expressed, Melissa.

So I think today if you deliver a product or a service, you have a value stream. So it’s not a matter of creating or defining value streams. It’s discovering the value streams that you have and applying VSM to make sure that you are converting that value stream into an asset for the company. Because if you are not applying VSM, there’s a good chance that those complex value streams can easily become a liability for your business.

Melissa Reeve:

Well, that’s a relief to me to hear you say that these value streams already exist and it’s a matter of uncovering them. Because just hearing you and Richard talk about the need for them, I was feeling a little bit overwhelmed, feeling like, wow, I understand how critical this is, but how do I even start this? This feels a little overwhelming.

So, Richard, for our listeners who are looking to get started with value streams and value stream management, what advice do you have?

Richard Knaster:

My advice is to start with one value stream, and first, understand the steps in the operational value stream. And then from there, you can identify the developers who are needed to create the solutions that the operational value stream uses or sells. And get a team together to do that mapping, understand where the bottlenecks are, understand where other delays and handoffs exist, and focus on how those bottlenecks could be resolved.

Now, I do agree that these value streams already exist in an organization. However, the development value streams are another story. We have to design those value streams based on being able to serve those operational value streams. So that’s a little bit different. I just want to make sure that everyone is clear about that. SAFe has a great toolkit on value stream identification and that workshop will really help you identify your value streams and as well as how to map them.

Really, identifying value streams isn’t all that hard when you think about it. It’s simply the products and solutions that your organization sells. So I often go to the company’s website and I look at what products and services the company provides, or go to their annual report and see what products and services they provide. I then take a look at the Agile teams and what solutions they’re currently working on and kind of create a matrix between the teams and then the solutions that they’re working on. And that’s another way, another signal that I can understand how to organize the development value stream.

Melissa Reeve:

And I know a lot of our listeners sometimes struggle with the differences between value stream identification and value stream mapping. In fact, we’ve done, I believe, a whole episode around that. It seems like it could be a little bit of a chicken and the egg. But in your opinion, which comes first? Do you identify your value streams and then start to map them, or should people start where they’re at and take something they’re doing and start mapping that out, and then try and tie that up to some sort of value stream that gets identified at a later point in time?

Richard Knaster:

Yeah, that’s a good question. So the first thing we want to do is we want to identify the value streams first before we map them. And we also want to select, of all the different value streams that we could be working on, which one would be the best one to start with. And that often lies at the intersection of four different criteria, such as is there a significant opportunity or challenge? Are there Agile teams that are already cooperating? And these factors help you decide which value streams to begin with. And then once you decide which value streams to begin with, then you can begin mapping that value stream and understanding the things that we discussed earlier.

Melissa Reeve:

Yeah. Thanks for that. So, Marc, I know you also are deep into value streams and value stream management. What guidance would you have for a newbie?

Marc Rix:

So my advice would be very similar to Rich’s. First, we need to identify those value streams. After all, we need to know what the steps involved are in moving a concept all the way through our delivery pipelines to final delivery to the customer. We can’t map anything if we don’t know those steps. So a key input to value stream mapping is the value stream itself, the value stream definition, the steps, the people involved. So that needs to be laid down beforehand. Then we can do the deep analysis that’s involved in value stream mapping to really understand the health and the performance of those value streams and make determinations about where the critical bottlenecks are, where we should be applying our efforts, and how we should be developing an action plan for optimizing those value streams.

Melissa Reeve:

So Marc, is there a method to this madness? I mean, it sounds like it’s simple, but it seems like there’s more to it.

Marc Rix:

Right. Exactly. There are always a million places to start. And with something like value stream management, which requires a full end-to-end value stream view, which stretches across the organization, we’re talking about managing a value stream that crosses a lot of different people, a lot of different organizations, a lot of different processes and technologies. So it can be a little bit overwhelming if you don’t know where to start.

So here within Scaled Agile, we’ve outlined a mini framework within value stream management that folks can apply to start thinking about value stream management in pretty simple terms. At least it’s a starting point. And we basically boil it down to three key areas—principles, practices, and tooling—a three-pronged approach to developing a value stream management discipline.

So we start with principles. We like principles here at Scaled Agile and in the Lean-Agile community. Surprisingly though, the principles I’m talking about here are not the SAFe principles. We need to go back to foundational principles. We need to go back to first principles with principles of Lean thinking. I know that Richard incorporates these five principles of Lean thinking in his work at Digital.ai too, so I think we have alignment there. It’s good to have principles understood across the organization to drive alignment among all of the people who are involved in the value stream, not only technical people but non-technical people as well, from end to end.

Then there come the practices. These are the things that we do from day to day to optimize the value stream, move product forward, and maintain flow. And then a critical piece of value stream management, which is becoming more and more not only popular, but critical in VSM as a discipline, is the tooling that’s involved. So because of the size and the complexity and the reach of today’s value streams, we really need to apply tooling to provide the monitoring, the observability, the traceability, and the tracking and the reporting, and the analytics that can help us optimize those complex value streams over time.

So it’s really, from a SAFe perspective, those three key areas: principles, practices, and tooling. Understand those. And understanding those and applying them across the value streams across the entire organization can help you as an enterprise know your customers better, have a more direct understanding of what products they need versus which products we want to push to them, or which products we feel they should adopt or should need, and how to define and measure that value over time.

So, all of these kind of work together to set the stage or set a foundation for beginning a value stream management journey—which, by the way, is not something everybody is starting from ground zero with. Everybody has a level of value stream management happening in the organization today. It’s a matter of where they’re going to go with it next and how best they can leverage principles, practices, and tooling to get them to where they need to be to support their businesses and customers.

Melissa Reeve:

Thanks for listening to part one of our deep dive into value stream management with Marc Rix and Richard Knaster. Be sure to tune in to part two when we discuss what value stream management means to people in different contexts and describe what value stream management looks like in the real world.

Be sure to check out the show notes and more at scaledagile.com/podcast.

Revisit past topics at scaledagile.com/podcast.

Speaker 1:

Relentless improvement is in our DNA, and we welcome your input on how we can improve the show. Drop us a line at podcast.scaledagile.com.

Navigate the Future with a Business Agility Value Stream – SAFe Agility Planning

Safe Business Agility

Three technology trends—artificial intelligence (AI), big data, and cloud—are converging to provide new ways of understanding, managing, and transforming products and services. What does that mean for enterprises now and in the future? In this episode, Dean Leffingwell, Scaled Agile co-founder and SAFe chief methodologist shares highlights from his 2021 Global SAFe Summit talk. He discusses the concept of the business agility value stream in applying SAFe to accelerate time-to-market and effectively compete in the second digital age.

Click the “Subscribe” button to subscribe to the SAFe Business Agility podcast on Apple Podcasts

Subscribe

Share:

Three technology trends—artificial intelligence (AI), big data, and cloud—are converging to provide new ways of understanding, managing, and transforming products and services. What does that mean for enterprises now and in the future? In this episode, Dean Leffingwell, Scaled Agile co-founder and SAFe chief methodologist shares highlights from his 2021 Global SAFe Summit talk. He discusses the concept of the business agility value stream in applying SAFe to accelerate time-to-market and effectively compete in the second digital age. 

Topics covered in this episode include:

  • Following investment capital for a glimpse into the future of technology
  • How and why Porsche is using AI
  • The importance of metrics
  • Three key takeaways to get started

Go here to read the business agility article on the SAFe website.

Hosted by: Melissa Reeve

Melissa Reeve is the Vice President of Marketing at Scaled Agile

Melissa Reeve is the Vice President of Marketing at Scaled Agile, Inc. In this role, Melissa guides the marketing team, helping people better understand Scaled Agile, the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), and its mission. Connect with Melissa on LinkedIn.

Guest: Dean Leffingwell

Recognized as one of the world’s foremost authorities on Lean-Agile best practices

Recognized as one of the world’s foremost authorities on Lean-Agile best practices, Dean is an entrepreneur and software development methodologist best known for creating SAFe®, the world’s most widely used framework for business agility. Connect with Dean on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Speaker 1

Looking for the latest news, experiences, and answers to questions about SAFe? You’ve come to the right place. This podcast is for you, the SAFe® community of practitioners, trainers, users, and everyone who engages SAFe on a daily basis.

Melissa Reeve

Welcome to the SAFe Business Agility podcast recorded from our homes around the world. I’m Melissa Reeve, your host for today’s episode. Joining me today is Dean Leffingwell, Scaled Agile co-founder, chief methodologist, and keynote speaker at the 2021 Global SAFe Summit. In this episode, Dean will share highlights from his keynote at the 2021 Global SAFe Summit, talking about business agility value streams. Thanks for joining me today, Dean. It’s so great to have you back on the show.

Dean Leffingwell

Hey, Melissa. Thanks for having me. And it’s so odd to be doing these without an in-person Summit.

Melissa Reeve

I know. We’re doing the best we can and we look forward to the conversation. Dean, in your talk at the 2021 Global SAFe Summit, you shared that by looking at financial capital, we can start to see what the future looks like. Can you elaborate on that?

Dean Leffingwell

This is triggered by my last keynote. When we introduced business agility back at version 5.0, and we were drafting a little bit of the work on the work of Mik Kersten and Carlota Perez. We were channeling some of Carlotta Perez’s work as she discussed the nature of technological revolutions and the way it changes everything about society. There was one slide that over a year and a half ago triggered my memory and just stuck with me. And that is how it is that if you want to understand where the production capital’s going to be amassed, you need to find where the investment capital is going now. In our case, the question becomes where’s the technology investment capital going, because that should help us predict where our businesses are going, where our technology needs to go, and give us a hint at the types of things we need to be doing in the future to better compete in this digital age.

Melissa Reeve

And so, what kinds of things did the data show?

Dean Leffingwell

I found three major megatrends; three, general-purpose technologies appeared again and again. One is the basic investment in the cloud—that goes without saying. I think enterprises are now spending literally hundreds of billions of dollars a year, maybe $200 or $300 billion on their transformation of the cloud. Another is big data, the presence of the cloud, the presence of more and more customers, the presence of IoT, the growth on autonomous vehicles is creating massive amounts of data and that data has to be stored someplace and then it has to be used.

Dean Leffingwell

And the third one, and I think the one that I found most compelling, is the current investment in artificial intelligence (AI). Now AI is not new. It precedes me as a software developer, but all of a sudden we’re starting to see incredible amounts of investment, not in the part of the fangs—the Facebooks, the Amazons, and the Apples, et cetera—as well as just those of us in more traditional enterprise businesses, making big investments in AI. And that says to me that these three, general-purpose technologies, AI, big data, and cloud, are coming together to create what I’m starting to think of as the next digital age, or at least the second half of the digital age we’re already in.

Melissa Reeve

So, I’ve got a couple of follow-on questions for you, Dean. The first is around Porsche and they also presented at the Global SAFe Summit. And they had a compelling story that included a little bit about AI. Can you share that story with us?

Dean Leffingwell

Yes, and there’s a bit more of a background story, which is that what we saw in the Summit was some excerpts from the Porsche interview. And as we went through the interview in detail, and we specifically drove down in the area of artificial intelligence, they talked about three areas where AI is dominant. They talked about using AI in development. So they use it to understand the performance of a vehicle on the test stand or even on the test track. They talked about embedding AI in the vehicle—how a car with literally hundreds of digital devices in it is creating data at such a rate that no programmer can possibly think through the logic of, if this happens, then we should do that.

Dean Leffingwell

And how they’re using AI to basically address the actual driving of an autonomous vehicle, as well as the safety aspects. And thirdly, they talked about how they’re using AI to better understand their customers, how they use the vehicles and various patterns of usage that wouldn’t be obvious if they didn’t have this mass data. And that informs them about potential new features that they need to build into the vehicle. So it’s a pretty comprehensive approach of in-development, in the product, and in the market of three different use cases for AI, all of which can have a significant impact in the future.

Melissa Reeve

Yeah. I mean, that’s pretty incredible to think about AI driving new product features. In fact, when I was in a conversation with a healthcare company recently, I asked them about their business use cases for AI. And they’re like, well, AI tells us what’s next. And it, it kind of blew my mind.

Dean Leffingwell

Really. AI helping figure out what the next machine learning algorithms are. That’s, that’s scary.

Melissa Reeve

I know, it’s kind of crazy. So, those kinds of implications bring us to the crux of your talk, which was the business agility value stream. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Dean Leffingwell

Sure. So we recognize that the SAFe big picture is a pretty complex presentation and it doesn’t tell its own story. So I wanted to think about simplifying the messaging and the application of SAFe in a way that we could really understand how we can leverage SAFe to absolutely shorten time-to-market. As we thought about that, we started thinking about, what’s the time between when you detect a business opportunity and when you address it. And that leads you to what development process we used to do that. And as opposed to traditional development, may the waterfall rest in peace, the business agility value stream lays out a general case, which is that there are a series of steps that you can go through from understanding the opportunity to building the MVP, to focusing on continuous delivery to deliver the MVP, to pivoting and deciding whether or not that’s the right thing to do, and continuing on all the way to continuous improvement.

Dean Leffingwell

So that business agility value stream is really a synthesis and a derivation that says, this is the way we should think about applying SAFe. And it brings to bear all the competencies in SAFe to help address the problem of shortening the time-to-market from the time the opportunity is identified to the time that’s delivered.

Melissa Reeve

And I think during the talk to you started to talk about the different stages in the business agility value stream. Are there one or two stages that you could highlight for our listeners?

Dean Leffingwell

Oh sure. I mean one that’s fun and I think mostly without conflict controversy is the MVP. So, there was a time in which we had maybe the arrogance or the confidence to think that we could identify a new business opportunity and go ahead and make the investment and exploit it, but we invested too much too soon and we invested it without the feedback necessary. So the MVP is a minimum viable product. It’s not a storyboard. It’s not a set of features that you throw away when you’re done with it. It’s a set of capabilities that absolutely prove that what you’re delivering to the market makes sense. And if necessary, proves the business case, and indeed allows you to check the business model where necessary to make sure that your investment is going to be proven. And then on into other elements of the value stream.

Melissa Reeve

When I was looking at the slides, you had a really compelling visual. And it was a skateboard that turned into a scooter that turned into a bicycle that, I think there was something else, but eventually it turned into a car as the MVP in each one of those modes of transportation are viable, right? It’s a viable way to get around. So it’s not about just developing it incrementally in terms of not being viable it’s got to actually do something.

Dean Leffingwell

No, I mean, the words are what it says. That’s a minimum viable product. It’s not a throwaway prototype or a storyboard or a hackathon that I put together to illustrate something. It’s something that you can actually do to prove the business case. And at the portfolio level, which is where we’re describing that the business opportunities oftentimes emerge, or even if they emerge within the teams, and ARTs are going to accelerate it for funding. That’s a place we want to make sure that we have measured investments. Every business should have more opportunities it can address. And the question is, which ones create the best economic benefit? In order to do that, we need to be able to pick and choose. And we don’t want to spend all our money on one, only to discover that it really didn’t have the right investment and basically deprive other equally good opportunities from their funding. And a series of MVPs, a few in progress and in the enterprise, is a pretty good way to think about the problem and make sure that you are constantly innovating without spending all the money at one time.

Melissa Reeve

Well, and you said something key there, you talked about a few in progress. So keeping that WIP in check, it feels like we’ve had some of those discussions around here. Can you speak to that a little bit more?

Dean Leffingwell

Yeah. I mean, because opportunity is always greater than capacity. There’s always a tendency to have excess WIP, and we know the damage that causes; it causes multiplexing downstream, causes thrashing, and causes the net productive throughput to go down. So we have to address that. And the way we address that is by thinking is by visualizing and measuring the work in process. And as you’re aware, we have a good way to visualize that work inside our own company. We have a Kanban system. We understand in general what we can and can’t address. We understand in general that when we have too many things in analyzing, we understand in general that if some things are in implementing and they’re not yet finished yet, we don’t have the capacity there to bring more work forward. So the Kanban system is a major protective mechanism for us, and it’s the heart of the portfolio.

Melissa Reeve

So, how will organizations know if they’re succeeding with regards to business agility value streams? How do they know where to improve?

Dean Leffingwell

Well, we spent a significant amount of time in the last year, basically reconsidering, refactoring, and essentially turfing out everything we had in metrics and recasting it. And in order to do that, we ended up with a simplified approach to measuring. It basically allows us to measure in three domains. One is outcomes, right? That’s the whole point, are we getting better outcomes? And those are mostly proxied by the KPIs that we associated with the solutions. Now, we don’t measure market share and profitability in SAFe, but we can measure whether or not customers are using a system or a solution or a feature set, or whether we’re entering new markets successfully with new products and services. The second one is competency, and we’ve been there for some time. We have the competency assessments built upon all the seven core competencies. They all exist now. They’re both downloadable and hosted online.

Dean Leffingwell

So an enterprise can measure how they’re doing. And the third one, which is the newest one in terms of a better description, is flow metrics. There, we leverage some of Mik Kersten’s work and added some of our own to come up with a set of six independent measures that measure flow. If we then look at how a business is performing or a business agility value stream is performing, you could look at all three, are we getting the outcomes by KPIs that we expected? Are we able to improve? Because we’ve got our competency assessments in place and we’re monitoring and making the necessary recommendations. And are we in a state of flow? Are there bottlenecks? Are there delays in flow that can be addressed? And I think the three together are really all we need to address even a very large portfolio.

Melissa Reeve

Yeah, it’s a really powerful set of metrics. And it’s interesting the way that they’re being used. Recently, I heard of an organization, it was a marketing organization, and they were baselining their metrics using the business agility assessment. So this isn’t just limited to IT anymore. It’s really cool to see it being extended into these other areas of the business.

Dean Leffingwell

No, I think in many ways in an enterprise that’s been at Agile for some time. And we work in companies, including our own, that have been doing agile for five or 10 years. You reach a point where if you cannot directly impact the operational value streams, where if the enterprise itself; if marketing and sales and HR are not also on the Agile journey, you’re going to reach a limit in terms of the velocity with which you can respond to market changes. So business agility is more than tech, but it includes tech. If we can’t build the solutions, nothing else is going to matter, but if we can build them but we can’t get them to market, if we can’t monetize them effectively, we can’t measure their uses. If we can’t deploy AI to figure out what our customer churn might look like or why people are or aren’t renewing or buying new solutions, we’re still not going to be ultimately successful. We’re not going to be able to compete in this second digital age.

Melissa Reeve

So, Dean, as always, your keynote was jam-packed with valuable information. What were some of your key takeaways for our listeners?

Dean Leffingwell

I always want to get something out of it. And I think there are two things that I appreciate. Number one, I do enjoy being entertained. So, if somebody has some neat insights and is kind of fun, I think that’s awesome. But I always ask myself, did I learn something that I could do different. Are there takeaways that I could do different? And I made, in the keynote, three specific recommendations. Number one, data has always been present, but all of a sudden the world has changed. You can’t do anything without data anymore. And you certainly can’t do anything without big data. And data science has often been one of those silos—data scientists that work and understand the data and create PowerPoint presentations, product managers look at that and go, “Yeah, right. What am I going to do with that?” And it’s yet another silo that has to be addressed.

Dean Leffingwell

So we want to integrate data science and data analytics directly into the Agile Release Train, not a separate thing. It’s just part and parcel of delivery. Secondly, AI is dependent upon a high degree of experimentation, very, very fast feedback. Hundreds and hundreds of experiments, thousands of experiments being run, little A/B tests. You can’t do that if everything requires a big batch, you can’t do that if you don’t have an effective continuous delivery pipeline. So the continuous delivery pipeline isn’t new, but I can say for a fact that ours isn’t where I want it to be. And I’m pretty sure that most of the people listening to this podcast recognize that they need to continually invest in their continuous delivery pipeline because otherwise, we can’t make a small change. We can’t experiment if we can’t get good, solid code to our customers very quickly.

Dean Leffingwell

And thirdly, there was a time when we recommended that let’s hang, let’s hang back a bit on Lean portfolio management (LPM), because what good is it if the teams and ARTs aren’t Agile? Well, guess what? We can start there. And we can start to think about what are the right investments. We can start to think about how we limit work in process, how we match demand to capacity. And we can do that at the same time that we transform our teams into Agile teams and an Agile Release Train. So don’t be afraid of LPM, just the opposite. You can pull off the shelf and you can start there in your transformation, whereas before it was kind of, well, we’ll get there when we get there. Let’s get there right now because if we’re talking about how to leverage a business opportunity, we can’t wait until the right teams and trains and ARTs are formed and operating and normed, informed, and stormed, and performed. We have to start now, so start with LPM. It’s okay.

Dean Leffingwell

It’s been working great. It’s probably the fastest uptake of any specific kind of IP or course we’re offering we’ve ever had out of.

Melissa Reeve

Yeah, LPM is becoming more and more important for sure.

Dean Leffingwell

It is.

Melissa Reeve

So, Dean, you started your keynote talking about being a little boy and having a Sputnik moment where you saw Sputnik go up in space and it really inspired you to follow or pursue a career in engineering and science. So, if you were a young boy today, what do you think your Sputnik moment would be?

Dean Leffingwell

Gosh, I would look at the … I had a young boy literally asked me just, I guess it’s been a year or so back, is it too late for me in computer science? It’s like, this is the dawn of the computer science age. So that kid looking at Sputnik would probably be looking at a keyboard now and probably thinking about all the amazing things you could do with computer science and how the journey is still ahead of us and how the opportunities of the future are going to be centered on software. You saw Elon Musk talk the other day about, it’s about the software. The vehicle is basically a software instrument with a battery and a drive train. So to the young boys out there and the young girls out there, let’s look at software, let’s look at science. The world is based upon science. And if you have the opportunity to pursue a science career, take it as fast and as far as you possibly can.

Melissa Reeve

You heard it here from Dean Leffingwell the future is still ahead of us. Dean, thanks for sharing the highlights of your keynote with us today.

Dean Leffingwell

Thanks, Melissa.

Melissa Reeve

Thanks for listening to our show today. Be sure to check out the show notes and more at scaledagile.com/podcast, revisit past topics at scaledagile.com/podcast.

Speaker 1

Relentless improvement is in our DNA and we welcome your input on how we can improve the show. Drop us a line at podcast@scaledagile.com.

Business Architecture and Value Stream Mapping – Agile Planning

Safe Business Agility

Organizational politics. Skeptical leaders. Differing perspectives and assumptions on how the organization actually delivers value. There are lots of potential hurdles to clear when an organization embarks on a Lean-Agile journey. In this episode, Adam Mattis, SPCT at Scaled Agile, joins us to discuss how business architecture affects value stream mapping.

Click the “Subscribe” button to subscribe to the SAFe Business Agility podcast on Apple Podcasts

Subscribe

Share:

Organizational politics. Skeptical leaders. Differing perspectives and assumptions on how the organization actually delivers value. There are lots of potential hurdles to clear when an organization embarks on a Lean-Agile journey. In this episode, Adam Mattis, SPCT at Scaled Agile, joins us to discuss how business architecture affects value stream mapping. 

In their discussion, Adam and Melissa cover topics including:

  • Where organizations get stuck when identifying value streams and how to get unstuck
  • The difference between value stream identification and value stream mapping
  • The differences between operational and development value streams
  • How business architecture supports value streams
  • How an organization can determine if it has a business architecture

Follow these links to access the resources that Adam mentions in the podcast:

Hosted by: Melissa Reeve

Melissa Reeve is the Vice President of Marketing at Scaled Agile

Melissa Reeve is the Vice President of Marketing at Scaled Agile, Inc. In this role, Melissa guides the marketing team, helping people better understand Scaled Agile, the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and its mission. Connect with Melissa on LinkedIn.

About Adam Mattis

Adam is an SPCT at Scaled Agile

Adam is an SPCT at Scaled Agile with many years of experience overseeing SAFe implementations across a wide range of industries. He’s also an experienced transformation architect, engaging speaker, energetic trainer, and a regular contributor to the broader Lean-Agile and educational communities. Connect with Adam on LinkedIn.

Stories from the Field: Revisiting Your Value Streams – Agility Planning

Safe Business Agility

We reorganized our company from three distinct business units to a functionally aligned organization, where everyone is responsible for delivering value to the customer.” In this episode, we talk to Janice Murray and Adrienne Dieball at ACT.org about revisiting the organization’s value streams and Agile Release Trains (ARTs) for successful business agility transformation

Click the “Subscribe” button to subscribe to the SAFe Business Agility podcast on Apple Podcasts

Subscribe

Share:

“We reorganized our company from three distinct business units to a functionally aligned organization, where everyone is responsible for delivering value to the customer.” In this episode, we talk to Janice Murray and Adrienne Dieball at ACT.org about revisiting the organization’s value streams and Agile Release Trains (ARTs). Find out the aha moment that helped them move toward organizing around value, the benefits of integrating business teams onto ARTs, lessons learned, and next steps. 

Follow these links to find resources for organizing around value:

Hosted by: Melissa Reeve

Melissa Reeve is the Vice President of Marketing at Scaled Agile

Melissa Reeve is the Vice President of Marketing at Scaled Agile, Inc. In this role, Melissa guides the marketing team, helping people better understand Scaled Agile, the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), and its mission.

Visit Melissa Reeve’s Bio

Guest: Janice Murray

Senior Director, Transformation Management Office - Janice Murray

As Senior Director, Transformation Management Office, Janice is a key leader in ACT’s transformation to an agile delivery model aligned around common services that deliver continuous value to its customers. Find Janice on LinkedIn.

Guest: Adrienne Dieball

Adrienne is vice president, content solutions and services at ACT. She has a demonstrated history of driving lean-agile projects, complex changes, and transformation initiatives. Connect with Adrienne on LinkedIn.

Connecting Operational and Development Value Streams – Business Agility

Safe Business Agility

When enterprises extend SAFe into the business, complexities can arise as people within organizational value streams interact with those in development value streams. In this episode, members of our panel share their insights and stories from the field about the role of the operational and development value streams in an enterprise’s journey toward business agility.

Click the “Subscribe” button to subscribe to the SAFe Business Agility podcast on Apple Podcasts

Subscribe

Share:

When enterprises extend SAFe into the business, complexities can arise as people within organizational value streams interact with those in development value streams.  In this episode, members of our panel share their insights and stories from the field about the role of the operational and development value streams in an enterprise’s journey toward business agility. 

Topics the panel discusses include:

  • Confusion around the difference between an operational value stream and a development value stream
  • Customer-centricity and organizing around value
  • Bridging the gap between operational value streams and development value streams
  • Optimizing the customer experience

Hosted by: Melissa Reeve

Melissa Reeve is the Vice President of Marketing at Scaled Agile

Melissa Reeve is the Vice President of Marketing at Scaled Agile, Inc. In this role, Melissa guides the marketing team, helping people better understand Scaled Agile, the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and its mission.

Visit Melissa Reeve’s Bio

Guest: Thorsten Janning

Thorsten focuses on the development of Lean and Agile organizations,

Thorsten focuses on the development of Lean and Agile organizations, as well as the implementation of Lean-Agile strategy and portfolio processes. As the first German SAFe Fellow, he is an experienced counterpart for c-level management on their way in the digital future for their enterprises. Find Thorsten on LinkedIn.

Guest: Saahil Panikar

Saahil Panikar

Saahil has worked with start-ups and small businesses, the Federal Government, and Fortune 100 companies across North and South America, Europe, and Asia—and is determined to help organizations extend their Agility beyond IT. Connect with Saahil on LinkedIn.

Guest: Yuval Yeret

Yuval Yeret head of AgileSparks (a Scaled Agile Partner)

Yuval is the head of AgileSparks (a Scaled Agile Partner) in the United States where he leads enterprise-level Agile implementations. He’s also the steward of The AgileSparks Way and the firm’s SAFe, Flow/Kanban, and Agile Marketing. Find Yuval on LinkedIn.

Operational and Development Value Streams

Safe Business Agility Podcast Cover Image

Organizations practicing SAFe® create value streams to accelerate time to value delivery. But what’s the difference between an operational and a development value stream? How do they coexist to optimize flow? And how are value streams critical to achieving scaled business agility? In this episode, Ian Spence, SAFe Fellow and Chief Scientist at Ivar Jacobson International, answers these questions and explains the key aspects of operational and development value streams.

Click the “Subscribe” button to subscribe to the SAFe Business Agility podcast on Apple Podcasts

Subscribe

Share:

Organizations practicing SAFe® create value streams to accelerate time to value. But what’s the difference between an operational and a development value stream? How do they coexist to optimize flow? And how are value streams critical to achieving business agility? 

In this episode, Ian Spence, SAFe Fellow and Chief Scientist at Ivar Jacobson International, answers these questions, and explains why you should think of the value streams as a partnership. He also shares his guidance around the intricacies of creating value streams, and how to balance the network and hierarchy sides of the organization for long-term success.

Follow these links to learn more about the following topics discussed in the podcast:

Hosted by: Melissa Reeve

Melissa Reeve is the Vice President of Marketing at Scaled Agile

Melissa Reeve is the Vice President of Marketing at Scaled Agile, Inc. In this role, Melissa guides the marketing team, helping people better understand Scaled Agile, the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and its mission.

Visit Melissa Reeve’s Bio

Guest: Ian Spence

Ian has helped literally hundreds of organizations in their Agile transformations by providing leadership, training, consultancy, facilitation and all levels of coaching. An experienced Agile coach, consultant, team leader, analyst, architect, and scrum master, Ian has practical experience of the full project lifecycle and a proven track record of delivery within the highly competitive and challenging IT solutions environment. 

Learn more about Ian on LinkedIn