Leveraging IT for Lean-Agile transformation
Leveraging IT is crucial in driving Lean-Agile improvements across the organization. Digital enhancements play a pivotal role in enhancing business processes, products, and services. By focusing on IT, organizations can become leaner, improving productivity and efficiencies throughout their operations.
Additionally, the IT organization supports business agility by providing the necessary information to adapt and evolve rapidly, supporting emergent business focuses, changing market dynamics, and evolving customer needs. In essence, IT acts as a catalyst for organizational transformation, enabling businesses to stay competitive and responsive in today’s dynamic marketplace.
But how do we determine the specific information required and its sources, as well as where to place our IT investment priorities? We’ll cover that topic in Chapter 5, Introducing the VSM Implementation Roadmap. But let’s start with a quick introduction in the next subsection.
Investing in IT value stream improvements
Investing in IT value stream improvements is crucial given the significant impact of digital enhancements on products, services, and critical business processes. To enhance productivity and efficiency within IT value streams, it’s essential to invest in appropriate tooling and skills.
In Lean, VSM has long been recognized as a proven method for identifying and prioritizing value stream improvement investments. Now, the IT community has embraced these concepts to drive enhancements across their DevOps-based software delivery pipelines.
Modern IT VSM methods and tools provide a strategic framework for optimizing value stream processes, IT infrastructure, tooling, and software products. Chapter 5, Introducing the VSM Implementation Roadmap, delves into the Value Stream Management Consortium’s (VSMC’s) role in this effort, and its VSM implementation Roadmap, which is pivotal in advancing Lean-Agile and VSM concepts within the DevOps community.
DevOps emphasizes Lean-oriented flow strategies, improving value delivery by facilitating collaborations and integrating the work of development and operations teams. For a deeper understanding, Gary Rupp’s book Driving DevOps with Value Stream Management further explores DevOps’ significance, highlighting its reliance on Lean principles.9
With modern VSM tools, DevOps-based software delivery pipelines are enhanced, offering visibility to identify bottlenecks and enhance collaboration. This enhanced visibility, combined with analytics capabilities, helps the IT department drive value across the organization, by aligning their activities to support other value stream improvement initiatives.
Evaluating information requirements and flows
We now understand how DevOps pipelines with integrated VSM tools can help derive productivity and efficiency improvements in IT and provide visibility to align their work with the organization’s priorities. However, to further that goal, we must also be able to understand how to improve decision making in a Lean-Agile enterprise. Chapter 10, Enhancing Decision Making in the Lean Agile Organization, provides guidance on how to evaluate the questions and information that have the most impact on driving business value. The core focus of this chapter is on teaching the BRIA process (short for Business, Role, Information, Action), a business intelligence framework that empowers you to define essential information needs. BRIA assists individuals at all levels of an organization in evaluating essential questions to determine the necessary data for creating informed decisions and taking appropriate actions.
This wraps up Chapter 1, Navigating Lean-Agile Transformations. By reading this chapter, you’ve gained valuable insight into what lies ahead in this book. We genuinely hope you’ll find this book both engaging and valuable as you embark on your professional learning journey.
