Enterprises are under ever-increasing pressure to deliver better quality products faster and provide an outstanding customer experience. In an ultra-competitive world, it is essential to drive digital transformation, leveraging all the resources optimally and stay ahead of the competition. Value delivery to the customer is the cornerstone of software development. Striking the right balance between innovation, speed of delivery, and customer experience loom large on executives’ minds today.
Optimizing the Organizational Ecosystem
Aligning development initiatives with business goals
Encouraging communication and collaboration between teams
Enforcing governance and compliance
End-to-end visibility across the toolchain
Organizations must fulfill the above-mentioned requirements to drive maximum business value, and Value Stream Management coupled the right integration solution can help them achieve that goal. The blog briefly discusses the need for Value Stream Management (VSM), and how OpsHub integration solution helps enterprises realize effective Value Stream Management.
Need for Value Stream Management (VSM)
Value Stream Management (VSM) is a methodology that allows enterprises to successfully tackle the modern world challenges associated with the product delivery ecosystem. VSM helps organizations better monitor and manage their Software Delivery Lifecycle (SDLC). Value Stream Management is customer-centric, and therefore IT enterprises are looking to implement it. VSM optimizes the project to product journey of an enterprise by measuring value and enabling its teams to have enhanced visibility and traceability across their ecosystem. It accelerates the software delivery process and enables organizations to deliver higher quality software faster to their customers at reduced risk.
The ecosystem, by nature, is heterogeneous with multiple functional teams involved in delivering the product. These teams choose the tools which enable them to innovate and be most productive. Across a product delivery ecosystem, typically enterprises use Project and Portfolio Management tools, Requirement Management tools, Agile Planning tools, Project Tracking tools, DevOps tools, ITSM tools, etc. There is no single vendor in the marketplace that provides a platform to meet the needs of these functional teams. Hence, the only alternative for the enterprises is to select best of breed tools which let their teams perform in the most efficient and effective manner. However, it presents a different set of challenges:
Manual and cumbersome reporting
Impossible to react in real-time
An Integration Fabric is Indispensable for Effective Value Stream Management
Different value streams are flowing through multiple teams in an enterprise. It is imperative for stakeholders (Executives, Portfolio Managers, Product Managers, Engineering Managers, QA Managers, Release Managers, Customer Success Managers, etc.) to have necessary data in their tools of choice to be able to manage their value stream effectively. Some of the requirements for the integration fabric to successfully fulfill the demands of modern enterprises are as shown in the graphic below :
An integration fabric with above characteristics will allow enterprises to implement Value Stream Management. Different stakeholders will then be able to get the right data in their own tools with full context, allowing them to take the right decisions in real-time. In such a setup,
- Portfolio managers will be able to see the progress of different projects in real-time and make appropriate changes to align engineering activities with changing business needs.
- Product Managers can accurately communicate to everyone (Customers and Business) about product/feature delivery and manage expectations appropriately.
- Developers get real-time feedback and understand bottlenecks as they appear.
- Release engineers can identify risks, plan appropriately and improve product quality.
- Support teams can engage with customers effectively and keep the customers happy.
OpsHub Integration Manager Provides the Fabric to Facilitate Value Stream Management
OpsHub Integration Manager (OIM) provides an integration fabric that helps enterprises organize their value streams productively. OIM supports 60+ tools across different categories and is a single solution to integrate all the tools used by an enterprise. OIM ensures that systems connected through it are always in a consistent state. There is no data mismatch in different systems allowing various stakeholders to manage their value streams and make faster decisions, all in their systems. Some of the other features of OpsHub Integration Manager are as follows:
Simplify compliance management
Cross-System Traceability: OIM allows cross-functional teams to manage end-to-end traceability between various tools in the product development ecosystem. For example, code to requirement, tickets to defects, etc.
Failure Management: OIM provides automatic failure notification and reprocessing as configured. It can deal with failures impacting the end systems as well as the OIM application.
Workflow/Changeset Support: Different tools have different data models and a different context to the same data. OIM supports data transformation while syncing data from one system to the other.
Conflict Management: OIM automatically detects and resolves the conflict between the source system and the target system, if any. It easily manages the synchronization failures and conflicts.
History Preservation: OIM maintains a complete history of any change in all the integrated tools as desired. It ensures that different stakeholders are looking at the same information in their tools of choice. OIM maintains a complete history of any change in all the integrated tools as desired. It ensures that different stakeholders are looking at the same information in their tools of choice.
Enterprises can also opt to deploy OIM on their own premises as well as on Cloud.
Summary
Value Stream Management (VSM) is a must for enterprises to accelerate their digital transformation journey. However, the first step in Value Stream Management is to integrate and unify the product development toolchain. The right integration platform is crucial to enable Value Stream Management, as it can optimize and elevate the value stream management to provide a strong foundation for digital transformation. Every stakeholder in the toolchain can then effectively manage his/her value stream by choosing the right functional tool coupled with an integration platform like OpsHub Integration Manager. OIM not only enables end-to-end Value Stream Management but also future proofs investments in the value stream management solution as customers can seamlessly transition from one tool to the other without losing any data, history, relationships, or context.
