{"id":20768,"date":"2020-10-22T09:00:26","date_gmt":"2020-10-22T14:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.planview.com\/a-compass-to-guide-your-project-to-product-journey\/"},"modified":"2020-10-22T09:00:26","modified_gmt":"2020-10-22T14:00:26","slug":"a-compass-to-guide-your-project-to-product-journey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.planview.com\/a-compass-to-guide-your-project-to-product-journey\/","title":{"rendered":"A Compass to Guide Your Project to Product Journey"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Why do we need a compass in real life? To make sure we don’t waste time, energy and resources going in the wrong direction, or worse, getting lost and never reaching our destination.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What does transitioning from project to product really mean? It’s about IT organizations moving from a temporary view of managing initiatives to a persistent view of improving products that are the lifeblood of the business. <\/span>While it’s a crucial shift in approaching IT and enterprise software delivery to accelerate market response and adaptability, it’s also a journey. And like any journey, it requires a compass to guide decision-making where it matters most to your customers. <\/span>With the right set of business-centric metrics that focus on the flow of work across the product value stream, IT and business leaders can leverage objective real-time data to identify the bottlenecks slowing them down, inform investment strategy, and measure the impact of changes to steer them in the right direction.<\/span><\/p>\n

Measuring Business Outcomes Over Activities<\/b><\/h3>\n

<\/b>When it comes to software delivery, there are many activities and siloed metrics. While these metrics are key in measuring flow in a specific area of the value stream (such as measuring lead time between code commit and deploy), they do not reflect the reality of how long it<\/span> really<\/span><\/i> takes to deliver business value from ideation to operation. You can be deploying hundreds of times a day, but if it’s not correlated with a business outcome (such as time-to-market, revenue, customer retention), then how do you know if you’re meeting business needs faster? <\/span><\/p>\n

Before starting the journey, you need a set of consistent outcome-based metrics for your current and future state. You need to measure your baseline and establish targets for improvement to gauge progress objectively. And once you’ve identified where your bottleneck is, you can dig in and probe issues with your area-specific metrics to unlock flow.<\/span><\/p>\n

Measuring the Flow of Value with The Flow Framework®<\/b><\/h3>\n

In <\/span>Project to Product<\/span><\/i><\/a>, Dr. Mik Kersten presents the measurement paradigm the Flow Framework®<\/a> to help large-scale organizations to adopt value stream management<\/a> (VSM), a systematic approach to measuring and improving flow that helps organizations shorten time-to-market, increase throughput, improve product quality and optimize for business outcomes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Through value stream metrics, known as Flow Metrics<\/a>, you can measure the rate of business value delivery for software products through the lens of your customers (whether internal or external), correlating software delivery work with desired business results such as revenue, cost, quality and employee happiness.<\/span><\/p>\n

These metrics are unique in the sense that they abstract away from details like team structure, technical architecture and tool implementations to measure the flow of software delivery work that creates and protects business value across the entire value stream. Crucially, the data comes from the tools that your product teams are already working in, leveraging their data (information about epics, features, bugs, security risks, defects, issues) to understand the reality of how work is progressing from customer request to delivery.<\/span><\/p>\n