View Post

Improving Your Team’s Performance Begins with Understanding Everyone Else’s Metrics

In ConnectALL, Value Stream Management, Value Stream Metrics by Soumya Menon

What are your most critical metrics for your job? What is your performance evaluated upon? These you know because they’re most likely tied to your performance evaluation, perhaps they’re tied to a bonus or merit increase. Now think about your colleagues in other departments. What are the most important metrics for them and how they’re being evaluated? Are your goals and metrics aligned? Are they competing?  Like most people, you probably haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about those questions, after all, you have a job to do and that can be overwhelming in and of itself. However, since …

View Post

A Christmas Miracle with Value Stream Management: How Four Elves Helped a Shoemaker Deliver High-Quality Shoes

In by Soumya MenonLeave a Comment

“We have just one piece of cloth left. How do I make any shoes to sell?” This is the story of a shoemaker who ran out of business and became bankrupt. He did not know how to survive without making shoes. He had no idea what his shoemaking value stream looked like He did not know how to use the little he had to maximize productivity and quality He was unaware of all the things that were affecting his shoe-making business And one night changed his life when four elves used that piece of cloth, left on the kitchen table, …

View Post

How to Automate Your Workflow Between Jira & Rally in Minutes

In by Jenna PottsLeave a Comment

Have you ever felt frustrated by long wait times and lack of communication when calling into tech support? What could it be costing your business if your customers are feeling the same way? When a customer reports an issue, they expect to know what’s happening and when they can expect resolution. However, customer support and development are typically handled by two different teams. This can easily create a communication breakdown where development doesn’t get the information they need, support doesn’t get timely updates, and the customer just gets mad. Outside of making your developers moonlight as customer service reps (or …

View Post

Managing Flow by Using Value Stream Management and Observability

In by Jenna PottsLeave a Comment

With DevOps pipelines having myriad of tools and DevOps teams not having an integrated tool architecture, the need for observability and lean practices like value stream management is imperative. DevOps leaders need to map out the data from their pipelines for metrics in analytics that drives critical business decisions. Observability in DevOps is the software tools and methodologies that help Dev and Ops teams to log, collect, correlate, and analyze massive amounts of performance data from a distributed application and glean real-time insights. And value stream management provides the ammunition to boost the impact of observability. In this short webinar, …

View Post

How to Streamline Your Application Lifecycle in Minutes: Connecting SAP Solution Manager and Jira

In by Jenna PottsLeave a Comment

Are you currently using manual steps to manage the flow of information throughout your software delivery value stream? Using a tool like SAP Solution Manager to manage your application lifecycle is helpful. However, if you choose to do so manually, then you are probably noticing either delays or breakdowns in communication between the teams involved with governance, development, and operations. Best case: you are adding layers of waste to your software delivery processes. Worst case: critical information is not being communicated properly between teams. So what can you do to automate the flow of your software throughout the entire application …

View Post

Recession or No Recession? Or Are We Already in One? How to Better Prepare for Both

In Business Innovation, Business Value, ConnectALL, Value Stream Management by Soumya Menon

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times…or in our case, what kind of times are we in? I just had two completely different phone calls this morning. One was with a highly qualified prospect and the other was with a client up for renewal. Both companies are in the U.S., operate in the same vertical and size of $500M – $1B, and have the same pain points of siloed teams, disparate tools, and unknown bottlenecks. But when it came to their approach about how to handle the economic uncertainties we are all in, they had …

View Post

Charting the Final Frontier (of Software Delivery): A DevOps Value Stream Mapping Workshop

In by Jenna PottsLeave a Comment

Like Captain James T. Kirk in Star Trek, most IT leaders and practitioners have a desire “to boldly go where no man has gone before.” What do we mean by this? Over the years, software delivery has gone through radical changes. Waterfall has led to Agile, and Agile led to DevOps. We’ve hired scrum masters, scheduled daily standups, and set up our kanban board. All of these efforts stem from the same end goals: work faster, build better, and don’t go over budget. Now that we’re in the age of DevOps and moving faster than ever, we’re done right? Not …

View Post

How to Use Value Stream Management to Identify and Eliminate Non-value-added Activities and Control Costs

In by Jenna PottsLeave a Comment

Irrespective of your company’s current financial position and performance, they need to sharpen their competitive edge by applying lean principles like value stream management to cost reduction — that is, the elimination of non-value-added activities or waste in the value stream processes. By tackling wastes from an end-to-end business process, your company can improve the value of their products and services. They can: achieve significant cost reduction reduce time-to-market emerge stronger with a more competitive profile Join Lance Knight, president and COO, ConnectALL and David Rubenstein, editor-in-chief, SD Times, in a 10-minute discussion, as they throw light on how VSM …