“How can you go faster if you don’t know what’s slowing you down?” Carmen DeArdo, author of Standing on Shoulders: A Leader’s Guide to Digital Transformation
Leading organizations, many of whom are in the Fortune 100, have taken key steps to architect their software delivery value stream around flow to successfully reduce the time to value of their software products.
Architecting for flow is crucial because enterprise software delivery, by its very nature, is a broken process. The complex — and often implicit — network of teams, tools and processes that plan, build and deliver are disconnected by the role-specific tools used by teams across the ideate, create, release and operate stages.
These excellent tools are built for purpose, such as planning, design, development, testing, service desk and so on, and enable specialists teams to do their jobs more efficiently and collaboratively. Even for the many organizations implementing the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®) to scale their software delivery, the complex product work spans dozens of Agile development teams and a heterogeneous toolchain.
All these tools, however, are not designed to integrate and naturally work with other tools in the value stream, meaning they do not automatically flow the product-critical information that specialist teams need for collaboration throughout a product’s development, delivery and support.
Consequently, these time-strapped and underpressure teams are forced into mind-numbing manual forms of knowledge sharing, such as:
- Email threads
- IMs
- Standing meetings
- Tool switching
- Duplicate entry
- Spreadsheet management
With no formal automated process, it can be hard to see how work is flowing between stages and obtain one source of truth of a product’s journey. If you can’t see the workflow to identify bottlenecks, how can you gain control and take the steps to improve it?
You can connect this invisible network through a series of integration patterns, which are common and critical interactions between the specialists and the tools they use to help plan, build and deliver software at scale.
Download our e-book on the topic to learn more about the common types of integration patterns that may feature in your software delivery value stream. You will learn how you can use these patterns to make the software delivery process explicit by automating and visualizing the flow of work from ideation to operation and back through the customer feedback loop. In doing so, you will also enable all teams to work in their tool of choice, allowing a best-of-breed approach to flourish.
Start stitching your integration patterns today
Request a highly-personalized demo to identify the scenarios that are causing the most immediate pain and enable the associated integration pattern. Over time, you should look to adopt more of these foundational integration patterns, linking them together to accelerate flow between the Ideation, Creation, Release and Operation stages that continuously plan, build, deliver and support software at scale. Once all tools are connected from end-to-end, you have a traceable and visible workflow that enables you to begin reporting and measuring performance through powerful Flow Metrics.
We also offer specialized workshops and courses with the industry’s leading authorities on flow and value streams:
Visualize your value stream (with one of Tasktop’s Value Stream Architects): This free one-hour consulting session will help you identify the value streams within your organization today, visualize the flow of work, and help identify opportunities to make your value stream more tangible. Learn more.
Introduction to value streams (with Brian Ashcraft): This two-hour training course enables you on the fundamentals of getting started with a VSM initiative, including common attributes, an improvement methodology, analytical methods, and a tooling assessment. After attending training, you will have the knowledge to become a VSM ambassador at your organization or agency. Learn more.
Flow 101 Workshop (with Dominica DeGrandis): Flow is the continuous smooth and fast delivery of business value, and is the first of the three foundational principles underpinning DevOps. This two-day hands-on workshop shows you how to enable flow in your organization using lean practices. The workshop is best suited for teams engaged in Agile or DevOps transformations who are looking to leverage Value Stream thinking to make their transformations more successful. This gives teams the opportunity to discuss and determine prioritization policies, workflow design, and metrics used to measure team performance. Learn more.
