How Identifying the Correct Value Stream Impacts the ART
Pause for a moment and ask yourself, what is the product or the solution that my company delivers? Now, consider for a moment, are the teams and ARTs that you’re working with directly supporting that product? Is everybody aligned to ensuring that the product is successfully delivered every day? Oftentimes, you will find that a company’s core competence is X, which isn’t necessarily what the teams and trains are attempting to build.
Let’s consider an Airline company. Its product is flying passengers from Point A to Point B. It also has a mobile app and a website that lets users book tickets, change reservations, check in, and so on. Like most companies, it is hierarchically organized to support flying passengers. However, when it embraced the concept of the Dual Operating System and socially aligned its ARTs with the products it was creating, such as a mobile app versus a plane maintenance scheduling application, they were inherently aligned with their Value Streams.
Pro tip
As a Coach, I recommend leveraging the SAFe® Value Stream Identification Workshop to identify your Value Streams and ARTS. This is an invaluable resource available to SPCs in good standing.
How should we Identify our Value Streams and what happens if we don’t?
Simply put, we should align our ARTS with the products or solutions that we are attempting to deliver, which, in turn, typically align with our Development Value Streams.
SAFe® recommends we start by identifying our Operational Value Stream and then determine which systems support it. Next, we identify the Development Value Streams that support those systems and subsequently identify the ART(s) for them:
Figure 6.1 – Example Value Streams and ARTs identified in the Value Stream Identification Workshop (© Scaled Agile, Inc.)
When we don’t align closely with our Development Value Streams, then our ability to deliver work continuously and on cadence is severely hampered. The teams will often be hampered by dependencies and/or will duplicate architectural efforts and have limited learning.
The smaller the organization, the less this will impact you as your scale is smaller. If I only have one ART or even two ARTs, then the impact of misalignment is significantly smaller than if there were 15 ARTs.
Pro tip
If you can’t re-align your ARTs, strive to reduce and minimize the delays in your system. Leverage Value Stream Mapping to identify your biggest bottlenecks and start there.
Our primary intention is to effectively flow work through our system. It’s like water flowing through a pipe. If we have a straight, clear pipe with the proper angle, water flows easily. Every bend, change in elevation, or even build-up slows down the flow. We want to work to eliminate the blockages, bends, and improper elevation.
Ultimately, we won’t get the benefits of Agile that we are looking for without proper alignment. If we don’t align our ARTs with the Development Value Streams, we will continually be challenged with dependencies, lack of overall alignment, duplication of effort, and significant challenges in the portfolio area, particularly when it comes to prioritizing the Portfolio Backlog and portfolio funding and budgeting (see Chapter 13).
Pro tip
Value Stream Identification and Value Stream Mapping are two separate activities. Value Stream Identification is used to identify what your Value Streams are and then identify what teams and ARTs are necessary to support the identified Development Value Streams. See the Value Stream Identification Workshop available in the SAFe® toolkits.
Value Stream Mapping involves looking at the steps in your Development Value Stream. SAFe® covers this activity in the DevOps class and has a Value Stream Mapping Workshop Toolkit that is available.
