Brace yourselves for a relatively new term making its way into the enterprise software lexicon: "value stream management[1]."
The philosophy, if you will, has been around for some time, but just got validated with the formation of a consortium, the VSM Consortium[2], which brands VSM as the "next generation of DevOps." The consortium's creators state that while DevOps principles create higher-performing organizations, "it's hard to know what's improving when your organizations are built from silos and data is buried, conversations are opinion driven. Thinking and working as value streams means teams obsess about the value their work creates to the customer and that they can measure how their experiments accelerate its flow to be realized in the hands of the customer."
Gartner also has plenty to say about VSM, predicting[3] that within the next two years, 70% of organizations will use value stream management to improve flow in the DevOps pipeline, and that it will "define the future of DevOps."
So, can agile and DevOps teams be encouraged and incentivized to move to the next step, and obsess about the value their work creates for the customer? There's no doubt that IT managers and professionals, on an individual basis, really want to deliver the best software they can. But when organizational dynamics get in the way, software will often miss the mark.
So what exactly is VSM? Flint Brenton provides a working description in a Forbes post[4] from a couple of years back: it's "a lean business practice that helps determine the value of software development and delivery efforts and resources. It also helps to improve the flow of value to the organization, while managing and monitoring the software delivery life cycle