As a founding member of the Value Stream Management Consortium (VSMC), Tasktop is always seeking to support the industry and the growth of Value Stream Management (VSM) in as many ways as we can. We believe that VSM is critical for companies to not just survive but thrive in the Age of Software. After publishing our first State of Value Stream Management Report and receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback from the industry, we are happy to share that the Value Stream Management Consortium is launching its first educational offering, the Value Stream Management Foundation course. This offering represents a significant step in our quest to create a community for individuals who are eager to continuously learn and improve the VSM discipline.
As I have discussed in the past, Agile and DevOps on their own cannot withstand the complications of rapid software and product delivery. VSM is necessary throughout all facets of the business in order to optimize all end-to-end operations and accelerate performance. Through the VSM Consortium’s Course, we outline:
- What value stream management is, why it’s needed and the business benefits of its practice
- Outlining the origins of value stream management and key concepts, including value stream roles, responsibilities and interconnectedness
- Lean, Agile, DevOps and ITSM principles and how they contribute to value stream management.
- Expressing value streams visually using mapping techniques, to define current and target states and hypothesis backlog
- Understanding flow metrics and how to access the data to support data-driven conversations and decisions
- Examining value realization metrics and aligning to business outcomes, and how to sense and respond to them (outcomes versus outputs)
- Architecting a DevOps toolchain alongside a value stream and data connection points
- Designing a continuous inspection and adaptation approach for organizational evolution
We are striving to make VSM the standard way of optimizing software delivery at scale. Enterprises must have end-to-end visibility into their value streams, from ideation to operation, to identify bottlenecks and pinpoint where investments must be made to improve the flow of business value.
This VSM course will continually change and improve over time as we build this community and master key takeaways, and our hope is that access to this course will lend awareness and understanding for those who are just getting started with VSM. At Tasktop, our specific flavor of VSM is based on the lessons we’ve learned in working with our enterprise customers over the years.
The Flow Framework®, created by Tasktop’s CEO and co-founder, Dr. Mik Kersten, in his bestselling book, Project to Product, is a very popular approach to VSM used by enterprises and government agencies around the world. We are thrilled to be part of the Value Stream Management Consortium to be able to offer our customers and partners this foundational course on VSM and augment that with our popular workshops, educational offerings and accreditations, and executive briefings available in our Flow Institute.
To learn more or to register for the course, visit VSMConsortium.org.
Find out more about Flow Metrics, check out our playbook for executives, The CIO’s VSM Playbook: 12 Steps to Mastering Software at Scale.
