Every business is now a digital business – if you’re not then you’re vulnerable to disruption. Traditional business models, infrastructures and operations are in a flux as software continues to usurp and transform the status quo. Look at Airbnb and hotels, Uber and taxis, Netflix and films, Amazon and retail…you get the picture. The message is clear: keep up or be left behind. Or to paraphrase organizational theorist Geoffrey Moore: “Innovate or die!”.
Most CIOs are acutely aware of this state-of-play and are under pressure to optimize their organization’s software delivery process. Many are investing in new staff, tools and processes to drive Agile and DevOps initiatives and are often encouraged (and given false hope) by initial success – especially at a local level. Then they try to scale and become stuck. There’s too many tools, people and disciplines. The toolchain is fragmented and their transformations are failing.
Why does this happen? The problem is that best-of-breed Agile and DevOps tools don’t work together, creating friction in the way stakeholders interact. This causes manual work that increases cost, reduces velocity, frustrates team members, all the while making it difficult for management to have the visibility and traceability that they so desperately need to make key business-decisions.
Organizations continually adopt new tools to improve the individual disciplines they serve – test automation, requirements management, agile planning, DevOps and the like. By using these tools, stakeholders create work specifically for collaborating with their colleagues. But that collaboration is compromised precisely because each of these disciplines are using different, unintegrated tools.
Furthermore, managers want to see metrics and dashboards for real-time status reports so they optimize a process and/or ensure compliance. However, with a fragmented toolchain it is nearly impossible to obtain a holistic view. And everyone knows that the only way to improve a process is to look at it holistically.
What can be done? The key is to integrate the value stream.
Value Stream: Sequence of activities required to design, produce, and provide a specific good or service, and along which information, materials, and worth flows – Business Dictionary[1]
When we talk about an integrated value stream in software delivery, we mean bringing together the tools across the software development lifecycle to radically improve team effectiveness and project visibility which allows you to:
- Eliminate the wasted time, errors and rework by automating the flow of work across people, teams, companies and tools. This increases the team’s velocity and capacity, enhances collaboration and improves employee satisfaction
- Enable real-time visibility into the state of application delivery by coalescing activity data across the value stream. This data can be used for management, optimization and governance reporting and dashboarding, as well as data for automated traceability reporting
- Create a modular, responsive tool infrastructure that can itself react and adapt to new tool innovations and changing working practices, enabling tools to be plugged in and out on-the-fly
Until now, creating this sort of integrated software delivery value stream has been too hard. Companies adopted point-to-point and homegrown integrations that were costly, brittle and unable to scale. It was simply too difficult to automate the flow of information across a large-scale tool ecosystem, making value stream integration and visibility financially unviable. But now the game has changed.
Our model-based approach dramatically reduces the complexity of creating and managing integrations, and scales to dozens of tools, thousands of users and millions of artifacts. For the first time, integration and visibility across the entire software value stream are economically possible and is helping some of the world’s most successful organizations – including nearly 50% of the Fortune 100 – to thrive in a digital world.
- Are you finding it difficult to give your managers the visibility into how things are going?
- Are your colleagues complaining that they spend a lot of wasted time doing administration?
- Is there a disconnect between your Agile methods and the need for governance and compliance?
If so, check out our videos of about our one-of-a-kind model-integration approach and speak to us today about integrating your value stream and to drive your Agile and DevOps transformations.
