DENVER, March 3, 2021 – Leaders of the software development industry today announced the formation of the Value Stream Management Consortium (VSMC). Founded by leading technology providers, Digital.ai, HCL Software, Plutora, ServiceNow, and Tasktop, the VSMC charter is to help organizations around the world improve performance and drive customer value through the adoption of value stream management (VSM).

Still in its infancy, the purpose of VSM is to delight customers by delivering software products that provide and create value for them. VSM achieves this through a comprehensive software lifecycle orchestration process that provides value stream managers, release managers, DevOps managers, product managers, and leadership with the data, visibility, and problem-solving tools necessary to continuously improve software development and delivery.

“At this stage in the development of value stream management it’s important that we create and foster a community of experts to further VSM practices, innovation, and adoption,” said Helen Beal, Chair of the Value Stream Management Consortium. “By creating this community, we will increase and accelerate the use of VSM, while developing and instilling best practices and standards. And, ultimately, just like the practice of VSM itself, we will help deliver the utmost value to industry practitioners.”

About The Consortium

The consortium will serve as a central hub of information and education pertaining to the practice and adoption of value stream management. Ongoing research will inform how organizations measure value and become higher performing as a result. Training and certifications will support member collaboration worldwide and help make VSM the industry standard way of working.

The Consortium’s inaugural research offering will be the `The State of Value Stream Management Report’ which will measure how teams are applying value stream management principles, practices, and metrics to influence their value stream management outcomes. The survey will be launched today, and its findings will be available in early May.

The Board of Directors is comprised of Chair, Helen Beal and representatives from the founding companies, including Richard Knaster, Chief Scientist, Value Stream Management at Digital.ai; Brian Muskoff, Director of Product Management and Development at HCL Software; Jeff Keyes, VP of Product at Plutora; Rohit Jainendra, VP and GM for ITBM and DevOps, at ServiceNow; and Neelan Choksi, President and COO at Tasktop. Advisors to the Board of Directors include Alistair Watkins, Bryan Finster; and Steve Pereira.

The VSMC is a professional membership association open to all. Members will receive the latest updates and unique learning opportunities evolving out of the growing VSM ecosystem, as well as participation in a fast-growing community of peers.

Lean enterprises perform better and deliver value more reliably, faster, and with higher quality and lower cost. They do this by applying value stream management to maximize flow, accelerate innovation, and improve value delivery efficiency and effectiveness, said Richard Knaster, Chief Scientist, Value Stream Management at Digital.ai. “Put simply, you need to go from managing projects to guiding long-lived value streams that focus on creating business outcomes vs. outputs. The VSMC will help organizations reach the next level in their Lean, Agile and DevOps practices to accelerate digital transformation and enable continuous delivery of customer value.”

“Software delivery is prime to make another leap and the timing of the Value Stream Management Consortium could not be better. We are excited to be part of this organization as the industry starts to put VSM theories into practice to improve productivity, business results and quality of work life for tech teams across the world,” said Brian Muskoff, Director of Product Management and Development, HCL DevOps. “Over the last decade, I’ve worked with a wide variety of industries and organization types – big and small – to help deliver their DevOps initiatives, and one thing stands out in all of those discussions; value stream management is the practice that will advance DevOps into its next phase. With so many different applications and ways that organizations can take advantage of value stream management, I am eager to see what shape the VSM market takes, and how we at the VSMC can help.”

“Guiding any organization through a digital transformation journey is a daunting task and can feel like you’re being pulled in a million directions,” said Jeff Keyes, VP of product, Plutora. “Working with the VSMC and emphasizing the importance of the tools we provide to a wider market will only help me with my most important task at hand, delivering value to our customers. The customer is key, and value stream management is how software development teams are able to consistently meet their evolving needs.”

“Maximizing value from software investments is critical for businesses in order to deliver great experiences for their customers and employees,” said RJ Jainendra, VP and GM for ITBM and DevOps, ServiceNow. “By partnering with the VSMC, ServiceNow is furthering the adoption of VSM to improve end-to-end value delivery processes, ultimately assisting organizations with driving impactful digital transformations.”

“Every CIO of a large, traditional company thrust into digital transformation shares the same struggle: quantifying and optimizing the value of their investments. Technical metrics, proxy metrics, simply do not translate to business outcomes. The industry requires a common language, standardized measurements and unified tools or many costly digital transformation efforts will fail,” said Neelan Choksi, President and COO at Tasktop. “Value Stream Management (VSM) transforms software delivery from the top, giving CIOs insights needed to adapt to market dynamics and optimize based on business outcomes, rather than process, while also providing actionable information for the IT teams doing the work. The VSMC will help to set and accelerate these standards, propelling enterprises into a future of innovation, without friction.”

The Value Stream Management Consortium

The Value Stream Management Consortium is the world’s leading organization creating, curating, and collaborating on research about the frameworks and principles of Value Stream Management. The VSMC delivers guidance around leveraging the best of Lean, Agile, DevOps, Systems Thinking, and beyond combined with world class technical solutions, integrations, and automation to accelerate the performance of organizations across the globe.

PORTLAND, Ore., Nov. 12, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Puppet, the industry standard for infrastructure automation, today released the findings of the 2020 State of DevOps Report. This year, over 2,400 IT, development, and information security professionals took the survey, revealing approaches that can help organizations scale DevOps principles and practices through providing more self-service capabilities and modernizing change management practices. Puppet’s State of DevOps report remains the longest-standing and most widely-referenced DevOps research in the industry after nearly a decade and 35,000 global survey respondents.

Taking DevOps from isolated teams to scaling across an enterprise is a significant challenge for any business. According to the report, establishing a platform approach to software delivery helps organizations standardize and scale DevOps practices across more application development teams. While the platform model is a fairly new approach for enabling application teams, it can help achieve overarching DevOps goals: faster and easier delivery of better-quality, more secure software.

Even more revealing in the report was that self-service capabilities were seen at higher levels of DevOps evolution, when companies’ DevOps practices are more mature. More evolved organizations are almost twice as likely as mid-level organizations to have high usage of internal platforms with self-service capabilities. Linked to findings in Puppet’s 2018 State of DevOps report, the DevOps evolution model consists of five stages of DevOps adoption which show critical practices at each stage and the “how” to get from one stage to the next.

“The underlying structural changes that have occurred to get to the highest level of DevOps evolution have reduced complexity in the technology stack, automated away a lot of toil, and reduced handoffs between teams — all while building a high degree of trust. These are all the necessary components for building an internal platform that can deliver higher value for the organization,” said Alanna Brown, Senior Director of Developer Relations and author of the State of DevOps report. “For organizations that are not ready to make the leap to a self-service platform approach, addressing change management processes within your company can also help eliminate toil and speed up software delivery.”

The report also revealed four common approaches to change management based on approval processes, degree of automation and risk mitigation techniques. The four approaches — operationally mature, engineering-driven, governance focused and ad hoc — result in different levels of effectiveness and different performance outcomes. Orthodox approvals make the change management process less efficient. Firms with high orthodox approvals are nine times more likely to have high levels of inefficiency than firms with low orthodox approvals. Teams that automate and practice advanced risk mitigation believe that their change management process reduces risk and downtime while facilitating the rate of change the business needs.

“This year we were able to gather data in-depth on how change management practices correlate with organizational success. The highlights for me were clear evidence that by using CI and automation as the primary change management mechanism outcomes are better, and effectiveness is higher,” said Michael Stahnke, Vice President, Platform, CircleCI. “Surprisingly, teams that have good outcomes are likely to not be satisfied with their change management process. Likely because they strive for continuous improvement — particularly when compared to organizations practicing a more traditional change management approach.”

Additional key findings of the survey, include:

63 percent of the respondents state their company has at least one self-service internal platform, and 60 percent have between two and four platforms.
Highly evolved DevOps firms are six times as likely to report high use of internal platforms as firms with a low-level of DevOps maturation.
Top challenges in creating an internal platform include: lack of time; lack of standardization; and lack of technical skills within the team.
Firms whose employees believe their change management is effective are three times more likely to automate testing and deployment than firms where confidence in change management performance is low.
Among respondents with full security integration, 45 percent can remediate critical vulnerabilities within a day. Just 25 percent of those with low security integration can remediate within a day.
For every person who completed the 2020 State of DevOps survey, $1 was donated to the World Health Organization COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund. An additional $45,000, provided by our generous sponsors, was donated to several nonprofits helping our most vulnerable communities cope with the effects of COVID-19, including WHO COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund, No Kid Hungry and Doctors Without Borders.

*Report Methodology
The survey collected data from technical professionals with a working knowledge of their IT operations and software delivery process. A third-party research firm, ONR, hosted the survey and conducted the data analysis. The resulting report was written by Puppet and CircleCI.

Supporting Quotes
“When it comes to change governance, larger organizations tend to be the ones to experience difficulties in succeeding with DevOps at scale. The findings of this year’s report highlights this pain point,” said RJ Jainendra, VP and GM, ITBM and DevOps at ServiceNow. “Part of the problem is that older change processes, which many larger organizations still use, have reinforced silos, leading to change evasion. By leveraging adaptive change, teams can eliminate toil, increase success, and in turn become high-performing. This can be achieved using a policy-based approach to automate the change process while ensuring the highest levels of governance and on-demand deployment.”

“Secure DevOps is a hot topic and it is exciting to see organizations are taking action,” said Omer Azaria, VP of Engineering at Sysdig. “From this year’s State of DevOps Report, we’ve discovered that highly productive DevOps teams automate security and compliance as part of their change management process. These are the teams that are able to both reduce security risk and accelerate application releases.”

About Puppet
Puppet makes infrastructure actionable, scalable and intelligent. From the data center to the cloud, Puppet helps enterprises modernize and manage their infrastructure to deliver innovation and efficiency through continuous automation. More than 40,000 organizations — including more than 80 percent of the Global 5000 — have benefited from Puppet’s open source and commercial solutions to ensure business continuity, optimize costs, boost compliance and ensure security – all while accelerating the adoption of DevOps practices and delivery of self-service. Headquartered in Portland, Oregon, Puppet is a privately held company with offices in London, Belfast, Singapore and Sydney