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We are the World Leader for Value Stream Mapping?

Recently, I am hearing things like  “We are the World Leader for Value Stream Mapping”   from vendors and managed service providers alike.  Why? I thought. Value Stream Mapping (VSM) was originally introduced in 1996.  Why is this becoming such a hot item again now?   Other tag lines and mantras that you are likely to hear are things like:      Experience Management is an Evolution Speed to Value not Time to Market Without continuous flow, continuous integration               Continuous Delivery are just an aspire! From Milestones To a Continuous Quality Assurance Flow Shift Left, and    Green to Green Every IT executive, manager, or practitioner can surely add to this list. I thought about these and other new ways of thinking and realized we are moving beyond Digital Transformations and understood that true success for any delivery cycle will require Flow Engineering. Without continuous flow service providers are likely not going to be able to meet business and customer requirements

ITIL® 4 and the Evolving Role of Roles

By Donna Knapp In the context of work, a role is typically defined as a set of responsibilities, activities and authorities granted to a person or team. While a role can, at times, represent a full-time job, this is not always the case. In the course of our work, many of us play different roles (i.e., we wear different hats). For example, we may play different roles within our teams (e.g., team lead or team member), or within practices (or processes) (e.g., practice owner, process owner, or practice/process practitioner), or in the context of a framework or methodology (e.g., customer, user, or sponsor; or product owner, scrum master, or scrum team member). Roles are important because they provide greater flexibility than job descriptions, which are often bound to formalized performance plans and perhaps even to contracts. This flexibility is important because organizations are increasingly adopting operating models that are more evolutionary and less structured than most companies h

The Mythical Value Stream Manager

Guest Host Post by Mike Orzen, previously posted on Mike’s Blog ,  March 25, 2021 For decades, the lean community has been talking about the importance of creating and managing customer value across the value stream. A value stream is comprised of all the activities performed to create, manage and deliver value to customers. It includes all the wasteful and broken processes we have come to accept as inherent in the way the work gets done. A key player who focuses on coordinating and aligning the efforts of all pieces of the value stream is the value stream manager. Their goal is to get everyone working together and aligned toward the common goal of optimizing their entire value stream. I like to call this character the “mythical value stream manager” because they are described in books but seldom seen in the wild – much like a unicorn. This person is the master coordinator among silos, conflicting priorities, constrained resources, and localized performance. No small task as most peo

ITIL® 4 – Decoupling Deployment from Release Management Practice

ITIL 4 is an evolution of ITIL V3. Before we start talking about specific processes or practices, it is important to stress that the focus has shifted. ITIL 4 gives us a fresh perspective to service management and emphasizes the customer user experience, the approach to the overall service value system, the service value chain and value streams , and much more.  Download the What is ITIL 4 document from the ITSM Academy Resource Center and be sure to read past the first few pages for more information on the new perspective that drives modern service management. The emphasis is on value from the customer user experience and integrated holistic approach. That does not mean that the processes are going away. Today we refer to a process as a "practice". Practices are broader in scope than processes and include all 4 dimensions/resources including the process. Two processes or “practices” that have been decoupled in ITIL 4 are the Deployment Management practice an

ITIL® 4 Service Value System and DevOps

The Service Value System (SVS) and Service Value Chain as indicated in ITIL 4 Best Practices give you the big picture macro view that should be the start of every DevOps Pipeline . Without it, you could get swept into the undercurrent and potentially focus too much effort or misdirect resources towards the technical and automation aspects of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).  Components of the SVS include:  The ITIL4 Guiding Principles, Governance, The Service Value Chain, Practices, and Continual Improvement. A Service Value Chain and Value Stream Mapping (VSM) exercise provides all stakeholders with a high-level view of the end-to-end steps required for your DevOps Pipeline. Applying the concept of “Systems Thinking” to the overall CI/CD Pipeline is critical but without including the information/data and flow of work we truly miss the mark. This is where Lean  principles and VSM are helpful.  Notice in the above image from our Value Stream

Site Reliability Engineer – Explosion

The Practice Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a discipline that incorporates aspects of software engineering and applies that to operations with the goal of creating ultra-scalable and highly reliable software systems. It is an Explosion!  If you have taken any classes including ITIL4, DevOps, Agile, or Lean , you have probably heard how critical Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is to the Value Streams and Pipelines that deliver products and services to this world. New concepts like understanding “Error Budgets” and the creation of anti-fragile environments are explored. You only need to visit one of the job sites and do a search on “Site Reliability Engineering” to see that there is a huge uplift in demand for Site Reliability Engineers. Try it! T he Role As a Site Reliability Engineer, you'll build solutions to enhance availability, performance, and stability for the resilience of services. You will also work towards a Continuous Delivery Pipeline by automati

The Four Dimensions of Service Management

For every system that is utilized to provide a service, there are four dimensions of service management. If we are to think and work holistically that means that every practice, and every aspect of service management for services need to be considered in light of these four dimensions. Organizations and People The aspects of the organization and people dimension are all related to the creation, delivery and improvement of services. To improve these aspects, everyone in an organization must understand its objectives and how they contribute to those objectives. It is not uncommon to see organizations restructuring in an effort to reap the benefits of Agile, Lean and DevOps practices. Organizations are increasingly forming cross-functional teams or product teams in an effort to break down silos and enable more effective collaboration. None of this can be accomplished without understanding how powerful the culture is in terms of its influence on organizations and individuals. Focu

Inclusion – Required for DevOps Continuous Delivery Pipeline

As a noun the official definition of the word inclusion is defined as the state of being included or being made a part of something. When a book covers many different ideas and subjects, it is an example of the inclusion of many ideas. When multiple people are all invited to be part of a group, this is an example of the inclusion of many different people. There are many certification classes available for DevOps, Agile and ITSM. All of them will speak of Inclusion. When considering inclusion in a DevOps Continuous Delivery Pipeline, service providers frequently miss the inclusion of some very necessary elements. In order to ensure real value, and cost-effective solutions fast, it is back to basics. Consider the inclusion of the following: Best Practices and Methodologies: These are the answer for how to. It is not just one best practice, methodology or standard that will get you there. “There” is where you are trying to go. Consider methods such as DevOps, ITSM, Agile, Lean and st

DevOps Leaders Take Action – Key Takeaways

Education, learning and certifications are necessary. Taking ACTION shapes our world. Getting certified is certainly valuable for career driven DevOps practitioners and leaders but what is most rewarding is listening to attendees of the course talk about the results and key take aways. Below are examples of key take aways from learners who attended a recent DevOps Leader course from the ITSM Academy’s DevOps Campus. Read through them. Get some tips for your DevOps leadership! Be inspired and take action! I liked the shared practices and discussion in class for the idea of figuring out who the "friends" of DevOps are. What I learned in this class will stay with me forever. Our value stream maps (VSM) are very detailed and complex. Therefore, I plan to go back and simplify our VSM’s so that we are seeing the highest-level view of the value stream. I learned from the VSM activity in this class how powerful that can be. This will allow us to "sell" the improv

Golden Keys to Unlock Agile Success

Communication and Education before Collaboration  An engineer attending a recent DevOps FND class for certification said “OMGosh! I have been trying to do DevOps and I really did not understand what it really was!” He knew that a self-organizing team was defined as a group of motivated individuals who work together toward a goal, have the authority to take decisions and readily adapt to changing demands. Solutions are derived from inter team collaboration. Innovation is the name of the game for digital transformations. All true but … “authority” without ability is dangerous.  Let’s not forget that before these teams are able to recommend innovative ideas for improvement that we must communicate the strategy and outcomes that deliver value. Also true is the fact that we must educate teams to continuously enhance their skills.  Challenge: During your next virtual or face to face meeting with staff, ask a few questions to validate that all are on the same page. You could as

Flow of Work

Agile Software Development is very well known and practiced in most organizations today in order to respond quickly to the ever increase in demand for IT Services.  Many of these organizations, while making some improvement, are not seeing the outcomes they had expected.  Why is this?   We are applying Lean methods, cycle time is increasing and yet, unplanned work, delays in deployment and unstable production environments remain. Consider the time from idea to delivery as the “ Value Stream ”.  Through this Value Stream, we want to increase the “Flow of Work”.   We will never see the type of optimization that is required unless we look at this Value Stream as a whole.  Applying Agile, Lean, and even tools in development without integrating Change, Security and Operations will break down and decrease the Flow of Work. DevOps helps with this idea.  Many companies, both large and small, are attempting to integrate the development and operations teams.  We have cloud services an

Agile / DevOps: Value Stream Mapping for IT Services – Some Thoughts

Value stream mapping  originated a s a   lean -management method.  Today this method along with Agile, ITSM and other LEAN practices is utilized to understand and improve the delivery of products or services for all industries.  Being able to analyze the current state for the series of events that take a product or service from concept all the way through to value realization by the customer is a powerful tool. A tool necessary for designing an efficient future state and for strategizing continual service improvement.  Below are some thoughts on how the approach to value stream mapping can be applied to service management. Getting Started: Beginning with the formal proposal or request from the customer and then documenting what takes place throughout the lifecycle is always a good starting point.  Value Stream Mapping requires a gradient approach including the following elements: ·          Define physical flow of events – If you are just starting out, it might prove helpfu

Is ITIL Still Relevant?

With the onset of practices such as DevOps, Continuous Delivery, Rugged Code, and Value stream mapping, is ITIL / ITSM Best Practice still relevant? The short and emphatic answer is YES! Let’s look at how ITSM Best Practices are relevant and enable some of the initiatives that are in the foreground of Service Management for many contemporary IT organizations today. DevOps – DevOps is a cultural and professional movement that focuses on communication and collaboration to ensure a balance between responsiveness to dynamic business requirements and stability.   Therefore, things like Lean and Value Stream Mapping, practices like Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment, all become a subset or a building block to a successful DevOps initiative.  DevOps is frequently an organic approach toward automating workflow and getting products to market more efficiently. Ok, if we can accept that then the next question is … What are you going to automate?    ITSM Best Practice

How Does ITIL Help in the Management of the SDLC?

I was recently asked how ITIL helps in the management of the SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle).  Simply put... SDLC is a Lifecycle approach to produce the software or the "product".  ITIL is a Lifecycle approach that focuses on the "service". I’ll start by reviewing both SDLC and ITIL Lifecycles and then summarize: SDLC  -  The intent of an SDLC process is to help produce a product that is cost-efficient, effective and of high quality. Once an application is created, the SDLC maps the proper deployment of the software into the live environment. The SDLC methodology usually contains the following stages: Analysis (requirements and design), construction, testing, release and maintenance.  The focus here is on the Software.  Most organizations will use an Agile or Waterfall approach to implement the software through the Software Development Lifecycle. ITIL  -  is a best practice for IT service management (ITSM) that focuses on aligning IT services with the