In the last decade, there has been a 10-20% increase in the number of regulations in the U.S. alone across a range of industries, according to RegData’s Industry Regulation Index. This development makes finance and insurance, transportation, healthcare, and manufacturing the most regulated industries in the U.S. on a federal level, among others — leading to Unique challenges regarding compliance and risk management High volumes of data Navigation of rapidly shifting requirements And shockingly, a high percentage of companies in the regulated industries, even today, manage critical compliance data on spreadsheets — despite the adoption of Agile, DevOps, and lean …
Six Ways Value Stream Tool Integration Can Improve Your Software Quality
Testing and quality assurance (QA) in software delivery has never been easy for any enterprise. QA teams need traceability and visibility into requirements as they are being created. The lack of which leads to siloed processes, disparate systems, non-alignment to customer requirements and business goals, delayed product releases, poor customer support and service, and even defects going into production — all affecting the quality of the software. Fortunately, when lean approaches like Value Stream Management (VSM) are implemented, teams can eliminate manual handoffs via emails, spreadsheets, and meetings. They can also implement techniques, such as automation, that enable information to …
Why Should Software Development and Delivery Teams Care About OKRs and VSM?
Should software development teams bother about Objectives and Key Results (OKR), or is it just a fancy term for another performance evaluation metric? Let’s clear this right away: the OKR approach is not task or to-do checklists, or performance evaluations; it is not the same as software development KPIs or MBOs, and it definitely is not a project management target. Despite the perception that executives are the only ones who should worry about OKRs, a well-planned and strategically written OKR — when tied to business outcomes — will have an impact on software development teams. Why? Because an OKR approach …
How VSM Can Help You Steer Clear of These Six OKR Mistakes
In 2020, when a majority of the workforce switched to remote working, organizations of all sizes across the globe turned to Objective Key Results (OKR) to figure out how to stay aligned while responding to rapid change in the business environment. OKRs, as you may know already, are a great way to attain audacious goals. This is because setting OKRs forces individuals, teams, and companies to articulate their goals in a time-bound and measurable fashion. By setting an Objective (a broad mission statement) and several Key Results (shorter, measurable assignments) great strides can be made in a quick and organized …
Five Core Beliefs About VSM ConnectALL Swears By
The software industry is overwhelmed and is drowning in thousands of value stream management (VSM) definitions — some are broad and some are vague. In the last couple of years, the market is also flooding with new vendors who claim to provide VSM solutions to drive agility and velocity and accelerate software delivery — some of which are not even complete solutions. Having worked in the B2B SaaS space and specifically practicing lean methodologies like VSM for over two decades, ConnectALL’s influencers and thought leaders have been advocating the correct understanding and adoption of VSM in the software industry. In …
Three Simple Strategies to Create Effective OKRs for Software Delivery Value Streams
How did Google grow from 40 employees to 139,995 and over $257 billion in global revenue? Sure, Google’s unique and ubiquitous products and services play a huge role. But they also have a covert yet overt strategy in their back pocket: Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). The OKR methodology was originally conceptualized by the legendary Andy Grove from Intel and Google adopted it in 1999 in its very first year of inception. Subsequently, OKRs spread across Silicon Valley companies. Recognized as a collaborative goal-setting system, today a lot of companies like Spotify, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Airbnb use OKRs. But OKRs …
Recession and Value Stream Management — Is There a Connection?
At the 2022 agile conference in Nashville on July 18-22, someone asserted that Value Stream Management (VSM) is more important now that we’re in a recession because companies need to redouble their efforts on efficiency. Then the discussion turned to whether or not we are in a recession. I guess that’s what’s on the mind of many, for good reason. But I argued against the whole premise of the statement, both that it’s important because of the recession, and that the goal is efficiency. My position was, and is, that the recession is irrelevant when it comes to value stream …
Address Your Company’s ‘Rock’ Or It Will Impede Forward Momentum
Note: Originally published on Forbes I recently was a guest on a podcast and discussed value stream management—the mechanisms of mapping the value stream, understanding flow and removing waste. I thoroughly enjoyed my session and felt that the moderator asked me some really great, thoughtful questions. I talked about one of my favorite quotes famously attributed to Peter Drucker, which is, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” While I agree wholeheartedly with this and have taken that approach throughout my professional career, another one of the quotes I shared was, “You are not managing something …