State of Value Stream Management Report 2022 by VSM Consortium

The State of
Value Stream
Management
Report 2022

THE STATE OF VALUE STREAM MANAGEMENT REPORT 2022
by the Value Stream Management Consortium (VSMC)
Lead Analysts:
Helen Beal and Eveline Oehrlich
Contributors:
Sejal Amin
Tracy Bannon
Chetan Bhambri
Neelan Choksi
Patrice Corbard
Bob Davis
Carmen DeArdo
Bernd Ebert
Bryan Finster
Richard Hawes
Jeff Keyes
Laureen Knudsen
Nick Mathison
Ray Padron
Steve Pereira
Donald Phillips
Yaniv Sayers
Marla Schimke
Florian Schouten
Editing and Proofreading:
Rupert Field
Graphic Design:
Jake Trudell
CONTENTS
Wow Moments 3
Insights From Our Members 4
Report Overview & Implementation Roadmap 7
VSM is Crossing the Chasm 9
Barriers to VSM Adoption 10
Setting Long-Term Vision and Goals 12
Connecting Flow Metrics with Business Results 13
Identifying Value Streams 15
What is a Value Stream? 15
Change Agents and Value Stream Management 15
Organizing Around Value Streams 17
Roles & Alignment to Value Streams 17
Team Types & Alignment to Value Streams 19
Mapping Value Streams 23
Who Uses Mapping 23
Value Stream Mapping Frequency 23
Why Teams Don’t Value Stream Map 25
Mapping by Industry 25
Connecting Value Streams 27
Tools for Value Stream Data or Flow Metrics Collection 28
Obtaining Value Stream Data 29
Value Stream Management Platform (VSMP) Adoption 30
Inspecting Value Streams 32
Value Stream Flow Inspection 32
Realization 34
Adapting Value Streams 37
Lead Time and Cycle Time 38
Key Takeaways 40
Demographics 41
2 The State of Value Stream Management 2022 | vsmconsortium.org

Wow Moments
7% 9%
10%
与明确命名的价值流保
持一致的受访者增加了１０％
6%
通过仪表板聚合仍然是获取价值流数据的最受欢迎
的方式，但这种做法已经下降了７％
4x
制造业仍然是最有可能实施
价值流映射的行业
度量组织成果的受访
者增加了６％
使用单一工具(购买的、以开源方式获
得的或构建的)增加了９％
试点或实施价值流管理平台（ＶＳＭＰ）
的受访者比例从５％上升到２１％
(*距离７０还有很长的路要走！）

我坚信价值流管理是为敏捷和 DevOps 计划的 ROI 提供改变游戏
规则的改进的正确框架。如果您能够以数倍的速度和更高的质量向
最终用户提供正确的功能，对您的业务会有什么价值？坚持使用 V
SM！
Florian Schouten
Digital.ai
来自会员的洞察
Carmen DeArdo
Tasktop (acquired by Planview)
报告中的发现往往与我直接与许多大型组织合作时的经验观察相吻合
。具体来说，对 VSM 相关主题的兴趣水平不断提高，但采用非常耗
时，需要执行领导层的支持和重大的变革管理。
Bob Davis
Plutora
首先，看到关于价值流管理的第二份研究报告发表是有希望的—
—甚至是令人兴奋的。就像我们的 VSM 指标本身一样，趋势信息
至关重要！我们处于市场的早期阶段，可以看到人们对 VSM 承诺
的热情日益高涨。研究中有几点表明，参与 VSM 旅程早期阶段的
公司数量有所增加，有时甚至是实质性增加。这些挑战是真实存
在的，并且在研究中得到了清晰的阐述。最紧迫的障碍包括：人
员——领导力和文化，围绕产品和价值流进行重组，在投资时平
衡长期价值和短期收益的挑战，以及简单地了解 VSM 是什么以及
它带来的好处。我继续对 VSM 的未来及其在帮助组织有效和高效
地提高向客户交付价值的能力方面的作用持乐观态度。我会回应
其他人的建议，在他们的 VSM 旅程中从小处着手；我将进一步向
供应商建议，我们继续简化和标准化必要的集成，以推动对 VSM
承诺至关重要的持续改进。
报告指出，虽然在许多方面都取得了进展，但在从面向项目的模型
到产品模型的过程中仍然存在挑战。实现这一目标存在各种障碍，
包括组织结构和财务融资模式。虽然更多的前期活动正在进行，但
由于缺乏领导力（根植于文化）和无法采用数据驱动的持续改进的操
作方式，各个领域没有完全实施ＶＳＭ。ＶＳＭ帮助告知领导者在哪里投
资以改善业务结果，更重要的是在哪里不投资。ＶＳＭ是指引持续改进
之旅的指南针。我仍然乐观地认为，随着更多的领导者意识到ＤｅｖＯｐ
ｓ和敏捷是不够的，ＶＳＭ是改善和保护客户价值的加速器，我们将继
续看到进展。

Jeff Keyes
Atlassian
敏捷已经存在了２０多年，ＤｅｖＯｐｓ已经存在了１０多年。两者都
是经过验证的方法，专注于增加交付给客户的价值。为什么我们没
有在采用它们方面取得更多进展，因为它们都已经证明了结果？这
是困扰许多ＣＩＯ的问题。ＶＳＭ的第二个年度状态表明，价值流管理
现在正在“跨越鸿沟”。软件领导者正在实现ＶＳＭ的承诺，以打破
阻碍敏捷和Ｄｅｖｏｐｓ采用的僵局，降低其软件团队的效率，并最终如本报告所示，价值流管理正迅速成为团结企业、提高投资回报率
和加速数字化转型计划的重要平台。我们的ＶａｌｕｅＯｐｓＶＳＭ解决方
案具有独特的优势，可以通过将ＶＳＭ联盟的最佳实践带入生活的
特性和功能，为业务和交付领导者提供提高有效性、效率和敏捷性
的能力。
降低交付给客户的价值。
每家公司都可以成为世界级的软件公司。利用价值流管理实践将
是帮助他们实现目标的关键。
Marla Schimke
Broadcom
该报告还提供了实施价值流管理的详细路线图，无论您处于数字化
转型之旅的哪个阶段。我们支持这些建议，事实上，我们的Ｖａｌｕｅ
ＯｐｓＶＳＭ解决方案中的许多功能都是专门为提供洞察力和加速ＶＳＭ
Ｃ推荐的流程而设计的。
Patrice Corbard
SD ReFocus
Insights From Our Members
如果第二版报告的某些结果一开始让我感到惊讶，例如在使用价值
流图方面，总体趋势是积极的。组织有动力识别低效的活动并重新
关注能够提供更多业务价值的优先事项。对ＶＳＭ联盟内部社区的活
力也能感受到日益增长的兴趣，来自不同背景的许多参与者可以聚
集在一起交流和推进我们行业中的这些实践。当然，我们仍然需要
克服误解和障碍，以促进价值流的采用和持续改进。成功的关键因
素是ＣｘＯ承诺发起和支持涉及经理和运营团队成员的协作计划。
作为ＶＳＭ联盟的领导成员，我们为我们对第二份年度价值流管理
状况报告的贡献感到自豪。这项重要的研究强调了受访者采用ＶＳＭ
的势头越来越大，以及它通过提高企业一致性、效率和有效性而
增加的价值。

Yaniv Sayers
MicroFocus
Tracy Bannon
The MITRE
Corporation
Nicholas Mathison
HCL Software
Richard Hawes
ServiceNow
Insights From Our Members
我为价值流管理联盟在过去一年中所取得的成就感到无比自豪。很明
显，我们的努力鼓励了各个行业的许多团队开始思考价值流。产生的
最重要的工件之一是ＶＳＭ实施路线图，它在指导团队完成他们的旅
程方面做得很好。但是，左右两半之间存在明显的鸿沟。数据显示，
团队在寻找初始价值的同时，努力在接下来的几个季度继续努力。展
望明年，我敦促价值流管理爱好者继续努力，不要气馁。行动将变得
明显，努力将通过历史数据进行对比。毕竟，“你无法改进你不衡量
的东西。”此外，在来年，我预测服务和产品将能够提升瓶颈并确定
纠正解决方案，以确保专注于价值交付。通过持续的承诺和指导，我
们将看到这一鸿沟的跨越和价值流管理在实践中的扩散。
就像昨天价值流管理联盟第一次走到一起，然而，我们在这里发布
了第二份年度价值流管理状况报告！虽然ＶＳＭ仍处于初期阶段，
但我们已经看到人们越来越关注将其用作从传统软件交付堆栈过渡
到新软件交付堆栈的催化剂。
虽然ＶＳＭ领域的大量精力都花在了洞察力和指标上，但我们注意到
企业将精力集中在将其作为治理框架的一部分——帮助自动化治理和
风险控制以简化价值流。对许多企业来说，造成价值流摩擦的核心问
题是如何在创新速度、降低业务风险和遵守监管义务之间取得平衡。
如今，这些工作主要是手动的，不仅增加了整体价值流的成本，而且
对员工体验产生了负面影响，尤其是对于分布式产品团队而言。可
以使用数据自动执行这些ＧＲＣ策略的企业不仅可以更快地交付，更
重要的是可以恢复成本节约以推动进一步的创新。这一领域有可能将
ＶＳＭ转变为不仅仅是在某些领域以洞察力为导向的成功，而是更多
的Ｃ级别的计划。
虽然ＶＳＭ采用处于早期阶段，但该报告反映了进展和挑战。一方
面，该报告表明实施ＶＳＭ的组织数量激增，另一方面，很大一部分
没有充分发挥ＶＳＭ的潜力。尽管ＶＳＭ平台的采用率越来越高，但
组织在从项目交付到产品交付的转变中显然面临挑战。我相信这些
是组织在学习和扩展其ＶＳＭ实施并实现最适合其方案的方法时所经
历的痛苦指标。随着经验的积累和ＶＳＭ平台的发展，组织将发现
利用ＶＳＭ并提高其业务成果和效率变得更加容易和必要。
总体而言，今年报告中的趋势令人鼓舞，但尚不乐观。出乎意料的
是，对于价值流实施过程中的大多数人来说，精力集中在早期阶段：
愿景、识别、组织、映射。奇怪的是，这四项中，组织是最低的！
寻找对价值流负责的人是一个基石项目。在查看数据时，缺乏资源被
认为是最大的单一挑战，因为缺乏人来领导近距离的工作。这两个数
据点构成了超过３０％的障碍。这说明了为什么组织在前四名中排名
最低。当我们在当前全球客户的劳动力演变中导航时，人为障碍将很
难解决。

现在是第二年，价值流管理状态报告确定并观察了整个采用路径的当我们在２０２１年首次发布此路线图时，我们很高兴地看到它引发了围绕
重新安排这些步骤的可能性的辩论。从广义上讲，我们选择根据行之有效
的“人员＞流程＞工具”的行业格言来展示此处的步骤。一些人建议的
一个反例是，团队可以在完全组织或映射价值流之前开始连接他们的ＤｅｖＯ
ｐｓ工具链的各个部分。我们已经使用这种方法观察了现实生活中的成功
案例。我们的假设是，在紧密联系的组织中，这是一个可行的快速启动，
我们打算在未来的研究中对此进行探索。
趋势。
我们今年的报告遵循我们的价值流管理（ＶＳＭ）实施路线图（如下）
。
我们已经研究并报告了数据，这些数据表明了组织采用ＶＳＭ的程度，
以及他们的组织、平台和挑战的性质，因为他们通过ＶＳＭ实施路线图
。
报告概览和实施路线图
适应
启动
愿景
识别
组织
映射
连接
审查
无论您身在
何处，都可以
出发。
定义您的价值流 — 将价值流中的参与者聚集在一
起进行映射练习。找到想法
的起点，并跟踪每一步，直到
实现价值。
您已经自动化了您的价
值流图，现在就使用它！
将ＤｅｖＯｐｓ工具链的各个部分与价
值流图中的步骤连接起来，并开始获
找到负责每个价值流中每
一步的人。
设定您的长期
愿景和目标。取实时数据和对价值流的洞察。
利用您的洞察力来设计和执行实
验，以适应和优化您的流程，这样
您就可以不断地取悦您的客户。
为您的价值流设定目标并
使用回顾来确定您的位置。
任何提供产品或服务的东西。
您的目标是加速价值流
向客户。

连接ＤｅｖＯｐｓ工具链、与组织的价值流保持一致的经验是映射经验的
两倍多，而使用ＶＳＭ平台（ＶＳＭＰ）来做到这一点的情况更加罕见。
最后，与积极适应价值流相比，受访者不太可能审查他们的价值流。
连接（ＶＳＭＰ）
在理想的世界中，每个人在路线图的每一步都会有相同的经验，但
目前随着我们沿着这些步骤前进，会有一个下降。从广义上讲，人
们属于两大群体之一：具有愿景、识别、组织和映射经验的人（大
约 2/3）；以及那些有连接、审查和适应价值流经验的人（大约 1/
3）。
20%
18%
18%
12%
14%
7%
6%
7%
8%
⅔
⅓
我们询问受访者他们已经完成了实施地图中的哪些步骤。２５％的受
访者尚未完成任何步骤。第一步——设定长期愿景和目标——最有
可能完成。更少的受访者已经开始围绕价值流进行组织，但映射价
值流的人数激增，在整个实施路线图的总体下降趋势中。这不足为
奇，因为价值流映射是大多数团队和组织进入价值流管理的门户，这
要归功于它在精益和ＤｅｖＯｐｓ中的流行。
您或您的团队完成了价值流管理实施路线图中的哪些步骤？
Report Overview & Implementation Roadmap
愿
识别
组织
映射
连接
审查
适应
景

VSM 正在跨越鸿沟
组织和行业在变革和风险偏好方面存在很大差异，相应地，在实施ＶＳＭ的准
备情况和意愿方面也存在很大差异。在评估整个ＶＳＭ实施路线图的市场采用
现状时，我们总结了：
社会学家埃弗里特·罗杰斯（ＥｖｅｒｅｔｔＲｏｇｅｒｓ）在其１９６２年出版的《创新扩
散》一书中，根据购买者的购买行为将购买者分组。这个模型，现在被称为技
术采用生命周期，描述了新技术产品或创新的采用或接受。采用者群体遵循
钟形曲线，组织、团队和个人可能会发现确定他们在采用生命周期中所处的位
置很有用。在《跨越鸿沟》中，ＧｅｏｆｆｒｅｙＭｏｏｒｅ描述了加速技术在扩散生命
周期中被团体采用的技术。
• 创新者使用工具通过洞察力驱动。那些在实施路线图中走得最远的组织已经将
他们的ＤｅｖＯｐｓ工具链连接到他们的数字价值流，正在审查数据和洞察力，并做
出相应的调整。根据我们的数据，他们主要关注流动性，还没有在相同程度上衡
量价值实现。
ＶＳＭ实施路线图是指导组织采用ＶＳＭ工作方式的一系列高级步骤。每一步
都为下一步奠定了基础，从而导致组织发展，该组织全面实践以洞察力驱动
、以ＶＳＭ为主导的实践，不断优化客户体验。路线图可用于设定和推动愿
景、凝聚努力和协调变革。
• 早期采用者正在围绕价值流进行组织。这些有远见的人已经确定了他们的价值
流和其中的角色。他们可能已经围绕价值流进行了大规模重组，或者他们可能保
留了传统的分层组织设计，但他们已经确定了他们的价值流如何跨越孤岛。他们
正在积极映射他们的价值流，并可能使用这项工作来使跨价值流依赖关系可见。
我们的数据显示，很少有组织完成了实施路线图中的所有步骤，还有四分之一
尚未开始。这与我们社区的说法一致——ＶＳＭ处于早期市场阶段，创新者（技
术爱好者）和早期采用者（有远见者）目前处于领先地位。为了达到早期的大
多数（实用主义者），我们需要跨越鸿沟。 • 早期大多数人开始绘制价值流图。他们知道他们需要改变一些东西，正在努力
寻找时间来节省时间，并看到价值流映射练习将为他们提供一个跳板来确定客户
体验的改进。但超过一半的受访者尚未绘制地图，这可能包括这些早期采用者中
的一部分。
• 后期大多数人可能还没有映射。技术生命周期表明，３４％的潜在采用者属于后
期多数，１６％属于落后群体。这个小组可能在某种程度上采用了敏捷（也许还有
ＤｅｖＯｐｓ），并且听说过ＶＳＭ，但还没有开始实践它。大多数组织进入ＶＳＭ的切
入点是通过映射。由于该小组可能尚未开始绘制地图，因此值得注意的是，他们
有机会从路线图开始并加速采用，而不会停滞不前。
• 落后者甚至可能还没有意识到ＶＳＭ。他们也可能不是我们调查的受访者。
为了让ＶＳＭ跨越鸿沟，我们需要继续建立社区并分享成功和学习的经验。采用
过程需要可衡量，从业者需要能够阐明使用ＶＳＭ优化客户体验的商业利益。

14.9%
10.8%
8.6%
19.6%
3.9%
17.8%
7.6%
3.1%
7.0%
我们无法找到外部帮
助
7.0%
您在组织中发现了哪些阻碍采用价值流管理实践的障碍？
• 资源限制是最重要的。与其他任何答案相比，更多受访者表示缺乏意识、技能
、预算和时间是采用的障碍。实施ＶＳＭ需要投入时间和金钱来建立意识和技能
——就像任何旨在进行改进的变革计划一样。ＶＳＭ的关键在于它为生产线注入
了能力——因此今天的投资以后会产生巨大的回报——包括以更快的速度交付更
多客户价值的方式的创新。
• 人们正遭受变革疲劳和冷漠之苦。ＶＳＭ在推动数字化转型方面紧随精益、敏捷
和ＤｅｖＯｐｓ之后——它是所有这些工作方式的演变。但是许多组织已经花费了多
年时间和数百万美元来尝试采用它们，因此，对于我们的受访者来说，发生太多
其他变革计划是阻碍采用它们的障碍也就不足为奇了。毫无疑问，他们还制定了
其他变革计划——例如并购、监管、重组、平台重组和多元化。ＶＳＭ的优势之一
是它使团队能够发现自己的改进，并有助于加速所有类型的价值流。因此，启用
ＶＳＭ思维的团队有权参与变革，并可以使用它来实现他们的工作交付目标。
其他我们没有领导层的支持
• 领导力没有赋能支持团队采用。将“我们没有领导层的支持”与“我们没有人
来领导这项工作”结合起来，这个问题以四分之一的总票数位居采用ＶＳＭ障碍榜
首。与ＤｅｖＯｐｓ一样，ＶＳＭ是一种自下而上／自上而下的工作，可以像ＤｅｖＯｐｓ
曾经那样由基层驱动。团队可以围绕价值流进行自我组织，随着个人对价值流的
我们尝试采用ＶＳＭ
实践但失败了
了解更多，他们可以自我提名为变革领导者。ＶＳＭＣ社区中也有许多变革领导者
没有资源（技能／预
算／时间）
可以被要求在一个有远见但缺乏拥有和交付资源的组织内设计和协调演进。
采用ＶＳＭ的障碍
在本ＶＳＭ状态报告的第二年，我们可以看到采用的萌芽——一些趋势表明，构
成ＶＳＭ工作方式的实践和平台的采用率有所增加。但我们坚信，我们正处于“
跨越鸿沟”阶段，我们所有相信ＶＳＭ掌握着开启数字化转型承诺的钥匙的人都
需要了解正在发生的事情——并弄清楚如何克服这些挑战带我们跨越鸿沟并进
入主流采用。这是我们今年了解到的采用障碍的信息：
• 工具发散是一个问题——但ＶＳＭ是一个解决方案。９％的人声称“我们跨团
队的工具太多了”，但这是ＶＳＭ着手解决的挑战。工具标准化是一个容易令
人激动的话题，因为它可能与赋予团队自主权的目标相冲突。此外，不同的团
队有不同的需求。例如，标准化产品待办事项工具可以提高透明度。在很多
人需要查看大量积压的情况下尤其如此。另一方面，测试工具可能只适用于
某些平台，并非所有团队都在以相同的速度发展。虽然采用新工具总是有好
处，但扩散会重复许可费用、产生复杂性并降低工作的可见性。这就是ＶＳＭ
和ＶＳＭＰ介入的地方。它们使工作可见，在工具之间创建标准语言并规范化数
据以产生跨团队的见解。
• 现在是时候了——去做吧。虽然２０％的选票分配给那些认为自己尚未准备
好、尚未进行ＤｅｖＯｐｓ或认为他们已经尝试过但失败的受访者，但我们说您可
以从任何地方开始。您无需大量采用ＤｅｖＯｐｓ — 将ＤｅｖＯｐｓ实践视为一个工
具包，以提供ＶＳＭ指示您需要的流动和价值实现的适应性。没有“准备好”
之类的东西——如果您想改善客户体验和组织绩效，那么ＶＳＭ适合您。如果
你失败了，你就尝试，尝试，再试一次。
4% 的人指出在获得外部帮助方面存在挑战。我们可以提供帮助。查看我们的会
我们在团队中使用过多的工
具
员目录。
我们有太多其他积极我们没有人领导工作
的变革计划
我们甚至还没
有完成ＤｅｖＯｐｓ
我们认为我们还没有准
备好

Yaniv Sayers, Micro Focus, ADM CTO
“对于ＶＳＭ是什么以及它可以带来什么，目前还没有很好的理解。它
首先要释放资源，避免不必要或多余的工作，并重新关注能够带来价值
的业务优先事项。与其他任何事情一样，有初始投资，但映射练习通常
足以确定可能显著的初始收益。”
这意味着什么
我们的大多数受访者是创新者、早期采用者和早期大多数人。我
们的大多数受访者已经确立了他们的愿景，确定了他们的价值流，
并且许多人已经绘制了地图；围绕价值流组织的人数略少。很少ＰａｔｒｉｃｅＣｏｒｂａｒｄ，软件交付顾问和ＶＳＭ影响者，ＳＤＲｅＦｏｃｕｓ
有人将他们的ＤｅｖＯｐｓ工具链与他们的价值流保持一致。采用新
的实践和工具时存在几个障碍——文化、成本和复杂性。熟练和
经验丰富的人才的可用性可能是推进实施路线图下一步的另一个障
碍。
在开始实施ＶＳＭ之前，正确设置与企业目标相关的ＶＳＭ愿景并定义与客
户的价值关系是至关重要的一步。事实如此艰难，如此重要，这是一些组
织难以成功实施价值流管理的主要原因之一。”
Ｈｕｄｄｌｅｓ是ＶＳＭＣ的成员专用焦点小组。ＶＳＭＣ目前有面向ＣｘＯ、顾
问、政府和价值流架构师的会议。
成员可以以任何频率加入他们喜欢的任何聚会。Ｈｕｄｄｌｅ在ＶＳＭＣＳｌＬａｕｒｅｅｎＫｎｕｄｓｅｎ，Ｂｒｏａｄｃｏｍ首席转型官
ａｃｋ工作区中有频道，通常每月开会，并讨论符合ＶＳＭＣ通过提供福
利和吸引新成员来为我们的会员服务的目标的主题（由参加会议的人
策划）。Ｈｕｄｄｌｅ还有一些输出，例如论文、框架和模型，可以定期
与社区分享，并发布良好实践和开放标准。还邀请成员加入ＶＳＭＣ
自己的价值流（例如研究、学习和内容）。
根据我的经验，与其他重大转型一样，实施ＶＳＭ是一段旅程。首先，领导
层的赞助和参与是成功的关键因素。整个组织的利益相关者将需要直接学习
、实践和改变他们的工作方式。对于一个组织来说，转向以价值为导向的思
维方式可能是一个巨大的飞跃，因此以敏捷的方式实施它将增加成功的可能
性，并使团队能够建立他们的ＶＳＭ肌肉。例如，从映射单个价值流开始，
在缺少所需数据时进行足够好的估计，识别并为一个瓶颈提供ＭＶＰ。随着组
织实践并开始体验切实的成果，就会产生动力，并且您可以扩展。
如果您今天还不是会员并想了解更多信息，请访问ｗｗｗ．ｖｓｍｃｏｎ
ｓｏｒｔｉｕｍ．ｏｒｇ／ｍｅｍｂｅｒｓｈｉｐ。

VISION: Set your long-term vision and goals.
The first step in the implementation roadmap is to create the long term vision and goals.
Before embarking on any kind of journey, it’s best to know where you hope to go.
The vision for your organization’s future should be developed, documented, and
socialized. A change agent will lead the organization on their journey and they’ll need
support to help all the individuals learn and practice the new ways of working.
Here’s an example of what some elements of VSM’s vision and goals might look like:
Setting Long-Term Vision and Goals
Vision Goals
Delighted
customers
Increase in reviews and referrals,
product and service usage, spend
Accelerated
time to value
Shorter lead and cycle times;
learning insights
Aligned, lean
organization
No silos; dependencies are
visible, managed, then broken;
waste is eliminated; work is traceable
Insights-driven
business
Data-driven decision-making for
improvements and customer experience
TIP: create a press release for your target outcome,
with the aim of communicating benefit to your customers

4.0% % Complete & accurate
2.7% Code change size
4.7% Code delivery speed
2.2% Code refactor rate
1.9% Code review churn
4.7% Code quality
12.3%
Cycle time and/or
lead time and/or
flow time
9.8%
Throughput or
flow velocity
6.2% Flow distribution
5.4% Defect distribution
(bugs by severity)
6.2% Deploy frequency
Flow efficiency 7.6%
Work in progress (WIP)
or flow load 10.1%
Rework 4.6%
Touch/processing time 2.7%
Work profile 2.2%
None of these / Other 1.7%
Technical debt 5.2%
Wait/idle time 5.9%
Which value stream flow metrics does your team measure?
Connecting Flow Metrics with Business Results
VSM connects planning to delivery—in the past, the “business” and technology have
typically operated in separate silos with the technology teams treated as order
takers. In the digital economy this must change—software is a strategic enabler and
competitive differentiator. While the focus of VSM is first and foremost on delivering
value outcomes that positively impact customer experience, customers will not be
well-served sustainably if the business itself is not profitable.
VSM brings business and technology leaders together to achieve business outcomes
such as improved revenue, velocity in bringing products and services to market,
and customer delight. Neither the technology teams nor the business teams alone
are responsible for the outcome and value a specific product delivers. It is a joint
responsibility of technology and the business, and it requires both groups to be held
accountable together for how and what a product or service (or value stream) delivers.
It requires the blurring or elimination of any separation—they belong to the same
value streams and should act as one.
Flow metrics tell the teams about the value stream health, and a healthy value stream
delivers good business results. They measure outputs and the efficiency of a
value stream. 30% of our respondents (see Inspecting section) don’t connect their flow
metrics to business results, but that leaves a healthy 70% that do, using a variety of
techniques including VSMPs. The top three flow metrics in use today are cycle / lead /
flow time (12%), work in progress (or flow load) (10%), and throughput (10%).
Value realization is about customer experience in terms of outcomes, and measures
the effectiveness of a value stream. As we explore in the Inspecting section,
organizations persist in prioritizing their own, lagging, business metrics over those
that tell them about customer experience.
Value
Flow Realization
Work's journey from idea to realization.
Its travel should be friction-free.
It’s a continuous steady stream
of value for customers.
The fulfillment of desired outcomes—
when a customer experiences intended value.
Then the value stream team can
take action on their insights.
Outputs
(value stream health)
Efficiency
Outcomes
(customer experience)
Effectiveness
• Cycle / lead / flow time
• Flow velocity
• Flow efficiency
• Work profiles / flow distributon
• Application / service / feature usage
• Conversion rate / customer journey
• Referrals / reviews /retention
• Value stream P&L / ROI

Value stream management is rapidly becoming essential for uniting the enterprise,
increasing ROI, and accelerating digital transformation. VSM empowers business
and development leaders with capabilities that drive ideas to outcomes, improving
effectiveness, efficiency, and agility. The implementation roadmap brings the
VSM Consortium's good practices to life.
Laureen Knudsen, Chief Transformation Officer, Broadcom
Working backwards is an effective alignment, motivational, and clarity method. It
can be framed from a customer perspective which improves the odds of delivering
real value, and sets a distant target that each decision along the way more effective.
Steve Pereira, VSMC board advisor
VSM exists to make the flow in the value stream visible so that it can be optimized.
You need to be clear about what your external market pressures are, your own
organizational purpose is, and how VSM supports them. Your drivers and your
purpose directly input into your vision and goals, as well as directly tying into your
benefits hypotheses, ensuring that your measures are relevant.
Bernd Ebert
Management Consultant Enterprise Service Management, iTSM Group
To make metrics a useful tool, they need to be used with systems thinking and a
generative culture. When they are, they can be a powerful tool for improvement.
Bryan Finster, VSMC board advisor
What This Means
When setting the long-term vision and goals for a VSM implementation,
value streams must coalesce around customer experience. Separations
between business and technology teams must be erased—the value stream
needs to be visualized, made visible, and managed as an end-to-end set of
steps where everyone is accountable for optimizing both how (flow), and what
(value realization) is delivered. The vision is of an organization where customer
experience drives the choice and prioritization of work and it’s delivered smoothly,
at speed, and with an outcome in mind that is analyzed once complete.
The goals can be expressed in terms of both flow and realization metrics—at high
levels (more customers, more usage of the value streams’ products and services,
more capacity for innovation or paying down technical debt for example). Goals
should also be set at a granular level (how fast a user story can go through the
system, what impact it has on customer interactions for example)—but this is
daily work for the teams as they execute the work using VSM practices—not to be
defined here as an organization embarks on their VSM journey.

12.2%
C-level executive (including CVO)
8.2%
DevOps advocate
or evangelist
14.4%
Coach or scrum master
(agile, DevOps, lean)
Flow engineer 1.5%
7.2%
Developer or
software engineer
3.2%
DevOps engineer or SRE
(individual or lead)
Value stream analyst 0.5%
Value stream engineer 0.5%
Value stream architect 2.74%
Value stream facilitator 2.74%
14.4%
Other
4.5%
Value stream lead/manager
Transformation lead 9.4%
(head of CoE, ways of working, etc.)
Product owner/manager 7.0%
Release/environment manager 1.5%
What is your role?
IDENTIFY: Start wherever you are, and then identify your value streams.
A value stream is anything that delivers a product or a service.
You’re aiming to accelerate the flow of value to the customer.
Traditionally, organizations have used dominator hierarchy-based organizational
design harking back to Taylorism. In this model, organizations are layered and siloed
according to reporting lines. In current ways of working models, including agile, DevOps
and VSM, the model shifts to one that is centered around products, or value streams.
Value streams exist in an organization regardless of whether they have been identified,
named and made visible. Wherever there is a customer, there is a value stream.
While VSM adoption requires the identification of these value streams, you don’t need
to identify all value streams up front. It can work well to pick one or two areas in which
to start experimenting and scale as you learn. This is a common feature of successful
iterative, evolutionary change initiatives. Like DevOps, VSM can be a combination of
bottom up and top down approaches.
What Is a Value Stream?
The concept of value streams is not a new one. It’s been around since the dawn of
lean manufacturing with the early information and materials diagrams from Toyota
representing early incarnations of value stream maps. In 1995, James Martin defined a
value stream in his book, The Great Transition, as: “An end-to-end set of activities which
collectively creates value for a customer.” Really, anything that delivers a product or a
service can be thought of as a value stream.
Identifying Value Streams
Change Agents and Value Stream Management
We aren’t surprised to see strategic thinkers and those accountable for making change
happen (transformation leads, coaches, advocates, evangelists and CxOs) being the
most common roles completing the survey since, as we’ve established, this emerging
market is currently "crossing the chasm". This means these change agent roles are those
which are driving the innovators and the early adopters to competitively differentiate
themselves using these new ways of working.

Value stream management adoption across a large organization starts with the
identification of people, typically across functions and geographies, who know steps
involved in delivering products or services. In most cases, value stream identification
is not a one-time exercise, but rather an iterative process, with each iteration adding
more clarity on steps and people who own those steps.
Chetan Bhambri
Digital Transformation Consultant & VSM Influencer
Seeing your organization as a network of interdependent value streams is a
powerful method for making work visible and finding high ROI improvement
opportunities that have massive impact. Mapping and capturing information about
individual streams allows for targeted and data-driven insights. Identifying where to
start—and how—enables confidence and helps manage scope as you dig—because
you will find a lot. The clarity provided by properly identified value streams allows for
direct and effective conversation amongst all the many stakeholders wrapped up in
any improvement effort.
What This Means
Seeing and naming value streams underpins VSM. Once we have this foundation
in place, we can make them visible and actively manage them. VSM is a new,
progressive way of working and as such needs people to make it happen.
Those change agents are pivotal—as they have been to the adoption of agile
and DevOps. Making change happen and stick is a skillset in itself that starts
with having the vision for a better future. They have to help the rest of the
organization see the art of the possible and then make it day-to-day practice.
It’s a tough job and many fall by the wayside in the face of unrelenting resistance.
Part of our role as the VSM Consortium is to support these practitioners, surface
and share success and provide tools to help them spread the VSM message.
Identifying Value Streams

ORGANIZE: Find the people accountable for every step in the value stream.
VSM means paying attention to the design of the organization. As companies move from
project to product, they are arranging around value streams even if they don’t realize
or acknowledge it—a value stream is anything that delivers a product or a service, so
oriented thinking requires attention to the end-to-end life cycle.
Roles & Alignment to Value Streams
In 2021 we asked if survey respondents had any roles aligned to value streams. In this
year’s data we saw a slight drop from 44% to 42%. Value streams encompass end-to-end
journeys, in order to ensure that thinking is done from a strategic level through to granular
delivery—and post-delivery optimization. Value streams contain fully multidisciplinary
capabilities, mostly federated from different teams. As we have learned from this,
and our first year research, the barrier to adopting VSM is not having the knowledge
and skills leading, facilitating, and driving VSM. There are many domain experts in the
existing teams, but VSM requires work beyond the silos and across various parts of the
organization. It therefore requires individuals who work, lead, and own the responsibility
for understanding a product value stream and improving it.
To understand which roles are present within organizations adopting VSM, in this year's
survey we have added four new roles: Value Stream Lead, Value Stream Engineer,
Flow Engineer, and Chief Value Officer. We are actively working with the community to
collate, create and share job descriptions for all of these roles.
We found that the roles of Value Stream Architect (8.0%) and Value Stream Manager
(7.6%) have the highest occurrence, followed by Value Stream Lead (6.7%). The new
roles of Value Stream Engineer and Flow Engineer are virtually the same—together, they
make up over 8% of the responses, making them together more popular roles than the
Value Stream Manager (which was leading in 2021).
Organizing Around Value Streams
Roles 2021 Roles 2022
Value stream lead or manager 17.7% Value stream manager 7.6%
Value stream lead 6.7%
Value stream facilitator 3.9%
Value stream facilitator 11.6% Value stream architect 8.0%
Value stream architect 9.8% Value stream analyst 3.7%
Value stream analyst 5.3% Value stream engineer 4.1%
Flow engineer 4.1%
Chief Value Officer 4.1%
44.4% 42.1%

Chief Value Officer (CVO)
Although only 4% of respondents reported having the CVO role in their organization, we are
calling it out because we expect it to grow and we find its emergence interesting. The CVO role
is an evolution of the CFO role being driven in part from the "integrated value creation" initiatives
from ISO 37000, concerned with the governance of organizations. As you can see in the table
below, the key characteristics of this new style of CFO, the CVO, align closely with the goals of
VSM: the breaking down of silos, the focus on value creation for the customer, and adaptability.
We believe that organizations should create this role when they adopt VSM, particularly for
large enterprises where there is a need to coordinate autonomy. Establishing the role sets the
tone from the top and brings the business and technology teams closer together.
Other Value Stream Roles
Other roles that were given included Release Train Engineer (RTE), Release Manager, Product
Owner and Scrum Master. That respondents called these roles out as aligned to value streams
has a lot of merit and we note that RTE is a role within the Scalable Agile Framework (SAFe),
which places strong emphasis on working as value streams. It could be argued that the release
manager role originates in ITIL and that product owners and scrum masters hark from the Scrum
framework. This does neatly express that most organizations are operating and adopting multiple
ways of working frameworks, many of which include elements of VSM. There is some logic that
suggests that a Product Owner, for example, could also be named a Value Stream Lead—using
the definition of a value stream as anything that delivers a product or a service.
Dimensions CFO CVO
Responsibilities
Financial
information
Multi-capital,
value-creation accounting
Resources to measure Money
Human,
social, intellectual
Organization
Demise of
reporting silos
Interconnected,
range of disciplines and perspectives
Value Shareholder
Customer, global economic,
social and governance impact
Mandate
Static,
limited
Dynamic,
expansive

Team Types & Alignment to Value Streams
The insidence of project teams practicing agile rose significantly in this year's data
(see bold in table below), while the product or feature team declined. As organizations
adopt these progressive ways of working, our expectation is to see an increase in teams
oriented towards products and value streams—as per Project to Product. It looks like we
have a way to go, but at least those project teams are aiming to utilize agile practices.
The momentum towards the alignment around value streams has grown since 2021
by more than 4%—and we’ve seen a 10% drop in teams having no alignment to a
value stream. We also saw an increase in organizing as shared service teams or teams
that cross value streams—supporting multiple value streams. These types of teams are
also often referred to as platform teams who provide a common service like DevOps
toolchains or cloud infrastructure to core value stream teams who are generating
customer value outcomes via their product or service.
Are you aligned to a value stream that is specifically identified
and explicitly named?
2021 2022 +/-
Yes 21.9% 25.2% +4.2%
No, I work for a shared service team or other cross‑value stream team 32.0% 38.7% +6.7%
No, we don't organize around value streams 46.0% 36.1% -9.9%
In which type of team do you work? 2021 2022 +/-
Project (waterfall) team 5.6% 5.5% -0.1%
Project (agile) team 11.5% 27.8% +16.3%
Product or feature team 25.3% 14.1% -11.2%
Component team 2.8% 2.8% —
Stream-aligned team 9.0% 7.9% -1.1%
Enabling team 20.2% 19.2% -1.0%
Complicated sub-system team 2.8% 1.7% -1.1%
Platform team 11.0% 8.3% -2.7%
Other 11.5% 12.7% -1.19%

Development vs. Operational Value Streams
Esteemed value stream expert Karen Martin has identified two types of
value streams in her approach, which she defines as follows:
“There are two types of value streams: operational value streams and development
value streams. Operational value streams are a series of steps used to provide
goods and services to a customer, either internal or external. This is primarily how
a business makes its money. The other, development value streams, are a series
of steps used to develop new offerings. To differentiate this further, development
value streams build the systems that operational value streams use to deliver value.”
However, when we are focused on digital value streams this can cause some
issues. Firstly, DevOps is a contributing or aligning framework for ways of working.
Underpinning DevOps is the desire to combine these silos and eliminate handoffs
between them through a combination of cultural factors (multifunctional teams
and people) and automation. Identifying two types of value streams in this way
makes the separation we are trying to resolve persist.
Additionally, value streams are different in the digital world. For example, we
are dealing with a long-lived product to which we are applying incremental
enhancements. We only make and deliver the enhancement once—before we go on
to design, build, test and release the next one. This makes the focus quite different
from manufacturing, where most of the time on a product is spent on producing
and delivering many copies of the product (e.g., bottles of ketchup).
In digital value streams, our time is proportionally spent much more heavily on the
design and development of our new enhancement and then releasing it. Advances
in CICD capabilities via the DevOps toolchain shorten the time spent on production
and delivery even further.

It is becoming increasingly important for technology leaders to play an active role in
the faster delivery of value by adopting practices such as Value Stream Management
(VSM). To deliver value to the customer and maximize business value, technology
leadership and teams need to translate high-level business goals into tactical and
operational values. According to Gartner, "By 2023, 70% of organizations will use
value stream management to improve flow in the DevOps pipeline, leading to faster
delivery of customer value."
Chetan Bhambri
Digital Transformation Consultant & VSM Influencer
Value Stream Autonomy
Like agile and DevOps, VSM seeks the creation of autonomous, cross‑functional teams
that design, build and ultimately own their end-to-end product and its life cycle.
This ensures they receive and act on feedback drawn directly from customer
experience. Asking the question “To whom does your team report about value in your
product?” gives us an insight into how much autonomy a team has in this context.
The data has not changed significantly year on year and we continue to hope that the
answer “We don’t—this data is for our own decision making” will emerge as a leader.
Core Versus Supporting Value Streams
Karen Martin also identifies core and supporting/supportive value streams. As we said
in the 2021 State of VSM Report, Marc Andressen’s famous phrase, “Software is eating
the world,” has evolved to a more general view that, in order to compete or continue
to compete in the new digital marketplace, organizations must consider themselves
to be technology organizations or software-driven organizations. A conclusion could
be drawn from this that digital value streams are the core value streams and other
functions such as HR, legal, and finance are supporting value streams—in addition
to the platform teams we identified earlier. This shouldn’t diminish their importance
though. As Karen Martin put it:
“There are two primary types of value streams: core value streams and supportive
value streams. In the strict definition of lean, supportive value streams are non-value
adding. However, this is a mistake. Supportive value streams are the core of how a
company treats its employees, and as a result, how employees treat the customer.”
To whom does your team report about value in your product? 2021 2022 +/-
We don’t—this data is for our own decision making 4.3% 3.7% -0.6%
Our team (in addition to those marked above) 8.3% 9.8% +1.5%
Product owner or product manager 17.7% 16.3% -1.4%
Direct manager or functional lead 11.2% 13.9% +2.7%
Value stream lead or value stream manager 6.1% 4.1% -2.0%
agile release train (ART) leaders 7.0% 6.8% -0.2%
Business stakeholders or customer 19.5% 17.7% -1.8%
CIO/CTO 13.2% 10.9% -2.3%
CEO 9.0% 8.5% -0.5%
Nobody 3.8% 7.4% +3.6%

The focus of transformations now includes strategic planning. We need to move
beyond simply funding good suggestions, to having market research that shows
the ideas we invest in have a high potential of providing significant value to our
customers. The person who leads that effort is the CVO.
Marla Schimke
Global Head of Product and Growth Marketing, Broadcom Software Group
Many organizations, owing to existing investment in organizational models, still
largely operate through project teams. Most of the companies I have worked
with are now getting started with value stream adoption and are in the process
of reviewing the current team topology and finalizing the desired state based on
organizational context and type of work performed by the team.
Chetan Bhambri
Digital Transformation Consultant and VSM Influencer
What This Means
Adopting VSM is an evolution in how teams design, develop, release, manage,
and govern products and services. Organizational design influences success.
Once the vision for what VSM will deliver is established and the value streams
have been identified, the next step is to actively engage and operate within
those value streams.
This means moving away from the traditional hierarchical and siloed way
of working, and organizing around value streams to optimize it as a whole,
holistic system. It might mean a restructure of the organization chart from the
top—but this is hugely disruptive. There is a possibility of a hybrid model where
the traditional structure remains, but the value streams are made visible and
they can be seen mapping across the teams.
In either approach, change agents and leaders need to bring people together,
engage others to be part of the change, evangelize methods and good
practices, and surface VSM success stories so that local discoveries can
become global improvements.

Mapping Value Streams
MAP: Bring the players for your value stream together for a value stream mapping
exercise. Find where the idea starts, and track every step until the value is delivered.
Value stream mapping is an entry point for many organizations into value stream
management. The practice precedes VSM, is well established in lean, and is increasingly
identified as a DevOps enabler in guides such as The DevOps Handbook. We see
mapping as an essential step to implementing VSM, but recognize that there are
challenges, some of which are eased by the use of automation.
Who Uses Mapping
We asked the question, “Does your team use value stream mapping to obtain data
about flow?” There was no significant difference between the answers in 2022 versus
last year’s report. We also looked for the correlation we found in 2021 for top and
high performers—this year, the largest percentage using mapping were the middle
performers, 54% of the total. Perhaps this is an indicator of how the market is adopting
VSM; we will continue to gather and analyze the data.
Value Stream Mapping Frequency
The benefits of mapping are widely demonstrated and recognized, but it’s a time
intensive process and can be perceived as expensive when highly paid resources
spend several days on the activity. Mapping is intended to be used as a continuous
improvement tool; with maps revisited and recreated to measure the journey as the
improvement experiments are executed. But when the practice is seen as resource
intensive, creating a regular cadence can be difficult. The data show that most teams
have mapped their value steam(s) only once (38%) because it is a manual and intensive
exercise. Using cross-platform tools, including VSMPs, to surface mapping metrics
means that you can continuously inspect your value stream. This is more typical for
teams who have made further progress through the VSM implementation roadmap.
We also asked when teams inspect flow (see the Value Flow Inspection topic) and
continued to find that teams that map are much more likely to inspect flow (90%) than
those that don’t (40%).
How frequently does your team map its value stream? 2021 2022 +/-
Once a month 15.7% 10.5% -5.2%
Once a quarter 12.9% 20.2% +7.2%
Twice yearly 12.9% 11.3% -1.6%
Once a year 16.3% 9.7% -6.6%
We’ve only done it once 14.3% 25.0% +10.7%
We’ve only done it once, but have planned to repeat within 6 months 8.8% 13.7% +4.8%
Other 19.1% 9.7% -9.4%
Does your team use value stream mapping to obtain data about flow? 2021 2022 +/-
Yes (total) 43.7% 43.4% -0.3%
No (total) 56.3% 56.6% +0.3%
Top performers
High performers
Middle performers
Low performers
60%
54%
44%
50%
42%
29%
52%
40%
36%
2021
2022

When we asked respondents to rank the answers, the top four remained the same in
2022 and are the "direct, in-practice outcomes".
Direct, in-practice
outcomes
Practice outputs that lead to
later and greater outcomes
Alignment, shared understanding and clarity The data and metrics we collect
The vision and goals we create The changes we agree upon
The team bonding and empathy The actionable insights we gain
The visibility and transparency into our system The hypothesis backlog we generate
Reflecting on the above data, the top four outcomes and challenges are all early-stage
items. Alignment, vision, and empathy are all tangible things that a team can gain
relatively quickly through one value stream mapping exercise. On the other side, the
inability or hesitation might drive teams away and prevent that first step. I believe as
more teams learn, practice, and engage in value stream mapping exercises, we will
see the lower ranking outcomes and challenges rank towards the top. This shift will be
a good leading indicator of teams embracing Value Stream Management principles.
Nick Mathison, Product Manager at HCL Software
What do you find most valuable about value stream mapping? 2021
Position
2022
Position
Alignment, shared understanding and clarity 3 1
The vision and goals we create 2 2
The team bonding and empathy 4 3
The visibility and transparency into our system 1 4
The data and metrics we collect 6 5
The changes we agree upon 8 6
The actionable insights we gain 5 7
The hypothesis backlog we generate 7 8
The Challenges for Value Stream Mapping
The number one challenge for mapping is making it happen in the first place—each time
we’ve asked this question. There’s a fair amount of movement in the rest of the table, but
making it repeatable comes next, along with getting permission to make the changes
that mapping identifies are needed for improvement. Right in the middle, both years, is
that the outputs are opinion-driven. Experiences show that humans "feel" how long work
takes and are eerily accurate, however we're always more comfortable with cold, hard
data. This is where VSM continues to help.
The Value in Value Stream Mapping
We can broadly split the eight available answers to the question: “What do you find most
valuable about Value Stream Mapping?” into two categories:
1. Outcomes gained during the practice of mapping (what happens in the room)
2. Outputs of the mapping practice that create outcomes when applied later
The latter set of outcomes result in measurable improvements. They are about making
the value stream visible in the long term and doing work to optimize it.
What do you find most challenging about value stream mapping? 2021
Position
2022
Position
Making it happen 1 1
Making it repeatable 5 2
Getting leadership buy-in to change 2 3
That the data is based on ‘opinion’ 4 4
Revisiting our learnings 7 5
Extracting insights 3 6
Ensuring the follow up actions are completed 6 7

Technology / Software
Education
Financial services
Government
Healthcare
Manufacturing
Not-for-profit
Professional
Retail
50%
50%
36%
53%
60%
29%
45%
25%
40%
Why Teams Don’t Value Stream Map
The lowest scoring reason for not mapping is that it’s already been tried and failed.
This was the only answer not to move position across the two years. This is good news
as it tells us that, on the whole, when mapping is successfully conducted, it proves
useful and teams are keen to repeat the exercise. What’s stopping people using it are the
challenges around resource constraints and alignment and coordination. The time and the
people are likely there—but mapping needs to be prioritized over other work. The problem
many organizations have is that they “can’t find the time to save time”. This is usually
because the focus is doing new things, not on improving the old things.
For those that don’t know how, it’s easy to learn and many experienced consultants are
available help you learn. You could read Karen Martin and Mike Osterling’s seminal work,
Value Stream Mapping and our members have access to our VSM Foundation course.
Module Three of the course provides a mapping overview, tailored to digital value streams.
Our members are also invited to appear in our Members Directory, so that people looking
for support with VSM practices can find them if they offer these services. Following the
VSM implementation map takes teams to a place where they automate to make data and
insights continuously available (see later sections) reducing the time needed to inspect.
Why don’t you leverage value stream mapping? 2021
Position
2022
Position
We don’t have the resources 6 1
We can’t get aligned 4 2
We can’t get the stakeholders together 4 3
We don’t know how 1 4
We can’t get sponsorship 3 5
We don’t know what it is 2 6
It takes too much time 8 7
It’s too difficult 9 8
We don’t think it’s useful 7 9
We already tried and failed 10 10
Mapping by Industry
This year, we looked at the data for value stream mapping practice through the industry
vertical lens, this being of particular interest to some of our Huddles, e.g., Government
and Consulting. It’s no surprise, given that this practice has emerged from lean which
in turn emerged from manufacturing, that it’s in this industry we are most likely to see
mapping being practiced.
Healthcare follows, then education and financial services, with both professional services
and the technology/software development sector (sixth out of nine) trailing.

It is interesting that organizations typically map only once. I have seen that
part of the time and energy used during the first exercise are for learning new
ways to visualize and communicate across parts of an organization's hierarchy
that have not been attempted before. That first session can be exhausting!
To me, it speaks to the need of having the proper value stream expertise in
place to coach people up in behavior and mindset. Finding a way to quickly
show the return on investment with value stream mapping is also key.
Ray Padron
Global Agile Transformation Lead at ICF Next
Efforts to improve work often lose out to the work. Teams find themselves too
busy to step away and see that they’re effectively using a dull axe to chop trees.
They don’t have time to improve because everything takes so long. In fact, they’re
often chopping away at the wrong tree. Value stream mapping is a few hours of
effort to save often days or weeks of waste. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t
have to be exhaustive, and just by coming together to talk in the context of a
value stream generates breakthrough, energizing conversation.
What This Means
Mapping is not yet a universal practice and it needs to be. Leadership needs
to mandate it across the organization and ensure that the resources are
made available, even if this means pausing work on the new, shiny things.
Invest some time now, and reap the rewards in increased capacity later.
And it needs to stick. To stick, it needs measurable outcomes.

Connecting the tools is about more than just integration. Integration is vital to give us
traceability, but the abstraction of the data offers additional opportunities. Through
manipulation, the application of algorithms, and artificial intelligence we can shortcut the
work to find optimum improvement opportunities.
The industry currently lacks standards specific to VSM data to accelerate this
implementation step, but advances are being made and investment being applied to
help organizations fast track this piece of the puzzle. For example, OASIS has recently
created a Value Stream Management Interoperability (VSMI) Technical Committee, and a
number of VSM Consortium members are working with them.
As we noted in the report overview, it’s possible to complete this step earlier in the
roadmap, with the goal of making value stream management an insights-driven activity.
It’s tempting to think of this as automating the value stream map, but it’s really using the
data to help humans see insights they would otherwise find very hard to unearth.
Primarily we focus here on extracting data from all the points in the DevOps toolchain,
but increasingly we are interested in how we can replicate this model across tools used
in supporting value streams such as sales and marketing, finance and HR. There is great
potential in connecting the tools they use on a daily basis to extract similar insight into
how to address delays, dependencies and hand-offs across supporting value streams
to accelerate the organization and improve customer experience.. And it’s not just
about flow, it’s also about finding the tools that provide data and insights into value
realization—connecting the business goals to what was delivered to the customer and
how experience was affected.
Connecting Value Streams
CONNECT: Connect the parts of your toolchain aligned to the steps in your value stream map and start getting realtime data and insights into your value stream’s flow.

Value
Stream
Management
Connect planning
to delivery
Trace user stories
as they travel
Continuous compliance
Visibility into
cross-value
stream changes
Inspect
realtime data
and adapt
Manage dependencies
while you break them
Gain insights
into waste;
optimize flow
Portfolio & Backlog
Vision and goals are set and
aligned to epics, features,
PBIs, and user stories
The
Value
Cycle
Insights & Analysis
Monitoring and observability
provide insights into customer
reaction to changes and
report on value realization
Continuous Integration
Code is created, artifacts
incorporated, versions
controlled, code is built
in a trunk-based manner
Continuous Delivery
The changes are approved,
released, and operated in
the live environment
Continuous Testing
Functional and non-functional testing takes place at
every commit, at every step or gate through route to live
We asked respondents which tool categories they use to extract value stream data or flow
metrics, and to rank them if they use more than one. In 2022, most people placed "Plan" in
position 1, but not enough people picked it for it to be placed first. This was the opposite
way around in 2021. This means that the CI tools category appears top of the list both
years, with support desk and monitoring tools coming last both times. This is indicative of
teams’ focus on building DevOps toolchains around CICD, and not connecting the entire
end-to-end ideation to realization lifecycle. But it’s better news for connecting planning
and delivery, which will lead to the ability to measure realization. And how can you know
what you realized if you didn't set an intention at the beginning?
Tools Category 2021 2022 +/-
Build and develop (CI) 1 1 same
Plan 2 2 same
Customer or financial systems 5 3 +2
Release and operate (CD) 4 4 same
Test/validate 3 5 -2
Support and service 7 6 +1
Monitor and Observe 6 7 -1
Tools for Value Stream Data or Flow Metrics Collection
On the right, we show how a DevOps toolchain layers over the value cycle, indicating
the types of tools where data can be extracted (connected) to deliver the benefits of
value stream management.
In the following diagram we show a typical value cycle for an advanced digital value stream
on the left, with five high level steps: portfolio and backlog; continuous integration;
continuous testing; continuous delivery; insights and analysis.

While aggregating through a dashboard remains the most popular way in which teams
obtain data about value stream flow, this practice has dropped by 7%. Using a single tool
(bought, acquired as open source, or built) has increased by 9%. Having a single tool is
important as having the capability to see all of the data in a single view allows teams
to see the patterns in the data. But dashboards are a problem, as they merely present
indicators from a number of different tools. This is overall positive news, particularly
since more people are buying the tools, and fewer people are trying to use dashboards to
obtain insights (why build something that doesn’t offer competitive differentiation and is
increasingly commodified?).
We don't believe open-source is the best answer necessarily simply because it's a new
market, and hasn't been commoditised (yet). We have not identified any open source
tools that match the capabilities developed by vendors and we wouldn’t recommend
people build these tools themselves—they should focus on building differentiating
features specific to their business and market.
Obtaining Value Stream Data
Where do you obtain data about value stream flow? 2021 2022 +/-
From a single tool we have bought 5.6% 10.8% +5.2%
From a single tool we have acquired (open source) 2.3% 2.7% +0.4%
From a single tool we have built 5.6% 9.5% +3.9%
From a number of tools we have integrated 18.5% 18.2% -0.3%
Aggregated from several sources / tools (e.g., dashboard) 36.6% 29.7% -6.9%
Manual collection from several sources / tools (e.g., spreadsheets) 25.9% 23.6% -2.3%
We don’t 3.7% 2.0% -1.7%

Using VSMP automation to inspect value stream health saves teams a good deal of time
running manual reports, integrating tools or building dashboards. It also has the facility to
provide insights and guidance that aren’t always obvious to the human eye.
The trend we observed this year suggests that those who were piloting tools last year,
have now moved into implementation. Overall, the percentage of respondents piloting,
implementing or considering VSMPs has increased from 6% to 36%.
However, we still have over half the survey respondents not using or considering using
these types of tools. In 2021, Gartner predicted that 70% of organizations would be using
value stream management to improve flow in the DevOps pipeline by 2023. Our data is not
showing that the market is meeting that adoption rate as yet using VSMP acquisition as an
indicator. Plotting our survey data against the steps of the VSM implementation roadmap
indicates that we aren't even close. Furthermore, we have to allow for a natural bias in our
respondents: they are only likely to complete our survey if they have familiarity with the
topic. Early indications do show the trend going in the right direction though.
Value Stream Management Platform (VSMP) Adoption
Do you use a VSM platform or tool? 2021 2022 +/-
Yes—we are piloting 6.0% 4.8% -1.2%
Yes—we are implementing 10.5% 15.3% +4.8%
We are considering it 13.4% 15.7% +2.3%
No 57.5% 54.2% -3.3%
We tried and failed 3.0% 2.2% -0.8%
I don’t know 7.1% 5.2% -1.9%
Not in our team, but elsewhere in the organization 2.6% 1.8% -0.8%

VSMP is an area where the increase in capabilities of the available commercial
solutions, including advances in use of machine learning to highlight
bottlenecks and risk areas, is outpacing many organizations' progress in
adoption of value stream management practices. However, adopting a VSMP
does not have to be a "big bang". As with many other things, target a series of
quick wins on your adoption journey.
Florian Schouten
VP Product Management, Value Stream Intelligence and Platform, Digital.ai
Developer experience (DevEx) is finally garnering broad attention. Part of DevEx is
the experience of being supported by leadership and capable tooling. Value stream
management platforms support leaders and developers by focusing attention
on what data is revealing as gaps and opportunities, rather than each individual
perspective and opinion. That attention can reveal real opportunities for powerful
automation that lets everyone focus on how they can best contribute.
What This Means
A platform may seem like yet another tool to buy and implement, but it
optimizes the existing investments that have been made. It makes insights
visible to the teams so they can rapidly self-discover, implement, measure, and
share flow improvements. It consolidates tools and helps large organizations
where tool heterogeneity, duplication, and drift all increase complexity.
The alternative is to standardize or rationalize the tools that teams are
allowed to use, but this is a painful compromise when teams have different
capabilities and needs. Standardization can mean sacrificing tools that are
better fit for purpose, and engender team autonomy. Whether they build and
run their own DevOps toolchain, or self-serve it from a platform team, teams
must architect their tools so that they can be integrated for traceability.
VSMP implementation will highlight these insights.

* What’s the relationship between Scrum and VSM?
Scrum is an agile framework, and VSM has its roots in lean. Both lean and agile draw on
the Toyota Production System. DevOps can be considered as a combination of agile,
lean and ITSM. VSM can be viewed as an evolution or iteration of DevOps, and DevOps
provides many of the answers on how to achieve the goals of VSM in terms of flow
efficiency and effective influence on customer experience. All these ways of working
have commonalities. The names don’t matter as much as the principles.
Inspecting Value Streams
INSPECT: You’ve automated your value stream map… now use it!
Set yourselves goals and use your retrospectives to look at where you are.
The Three Pillars of Scrum* are transparency, inspection and adaptation. Everything we
have done so far in the VSM implementation roadmap has been about making the work
visible. Now it’s time to inspect that data.
Value Stream Flow Inspection
At the VSM Consortium, we address dual dimensions in VSM: the "flow" or value stream
health (outputs and efficiency), and the value realization or customer experience
(outcomes and effectiveness). Nearly two thirds of our respondents don’t currently
inspect flow. The primary metrics for flow are lead time and/or cycle time, but nearly
a third of our respondents say they aren’t using these metrics at all. We could draw an
inference here that one third of our respondents have these metrics, but are either not
recognizing them as value stream flow metrics, or perhaps are not inspecting them.
In 2021 we asked “Do you inspect value stream, flow or technical metrics?”, whereas this
year we asked “Do you measure value stream flow metrics?” to tighten the scope. 60%
of our respondents said they don’t, compared to only 46% with the question phrased to
include the generic “technical metrics”.

27.5%
They measure
engineering productivity
18.0%
They measure the health
of the value stream
5.0%
Other
29.7%
We don’t use
lead/cycle time metrics
19.8%
They are equally used
Which statement reflects the primary usage of lead/cycle time metrics
in your organization?
Usage of Lead Time and Cycle Time
This year, we asked whether organizations are using these metrics to measure
engineering productivity or to measure the health of the value stream. Part of the aim
of all progressive ways of working (agile, DevOps, VSM, etc,) is to move away from
dominator hierarchies where command and control and silos persist, to multifunctional,
autonomous teams where authority is distributed. Another part is to elevate the digital
value stream as a strategic enabler to compete effectively in the digital world. Using
these metrics to measure engineering productivity is an indicator that the technology
teams continue to be treated as cost centers, and order takers. Productivity measures
should be replaced with value‑realization capacity measures.
These flow metrics’ primary use case should be for measuring the health of the
value stream, and yet respondents are almost twice as likely to use them for
measuring productivity.
That said, the view prevails that granting pure autonomy to teams is tantamount to
chaos. And that autonomy must be coordinated—leadership is needed to maintain
strategic vision, direction and steer the ship. When these metrics are used for both
purposes (as a fifth of respondents do), it satisfies the balance.
How does your team connect flow metrics with business results? 2021 2022 +/-
Using one, integrated value stream management platform 7.9% 8.8% +0.9%
Using multiple, purpose driven tools 14.3% 11.0% -3.26%
Flowing data from multiple tools to a dashboard 21.4% 15.4% -6.0%
Manually, using slide decks, spreadsheets etc 35.7% 35.3% -0.4%
We don’t 20.7% 29.4% +8.7%
When to Inspect Flow
About a quarter of our respondents use the traditional, time consuming, and manual mapping-
methods to inspect their value stream flow. There was no change in the percentage who
reported automated data collection. This year, we changed the question to allow the subset
of respondents who do not value stream map, to give the answer “Periodically, using a
manual method other than value stream mapping”, which changed the result significantly.
The significance here is that while people may not be mapping, they are inspecting flow.
While it seems that VSMP adoption is on the rise (see section, Value Stream Management
Platform Adoption), we see no improvement in teams’ or organizations’ ability to connect
their flow metrics to their business results this year. This is one of the great advantages of
VSM and VSMPs in particular—connecting planning to delivery, and feeding back results into
the next round of work. While we can see VSMP adoption increasing, it appears that they are
not being used to achieve this outcome. Yet.
Do Value Stream Map Don't Value Stream Map
When does your team inspect flow? 2021 2022 +/- 2021 2022 +/-
When we use physical value stream mapping 23.5% 26.3% +2.79 — — —
Periodically, via manual method other than
value stream mapping
27.5% 20.3% -7.15% — 30.6% +30.6%
Periodically, data collected via automation 18.3% 18.8% -0.5% 19.8% 5.7% -14.1%
Continuously, data collected via automation 19.6% 19.6% — 3.3% 4.5% +1.2%
We don’t 11.1% 15.0% +4.9% 76.9% 59.2% -17.7%

For which type of work item do you create a benefits hypothesis? 2021 2022 +/-
User stories 17.8% 16.3% -1.5%
Features 23.6% 22.5% -1.1%
Capabilities or initiatives 18.6% 17.0% -1.6%
Portfolio epics 17.1% 17.8% +0.7%
We don’t create benefits hypotheses 21.0% 23.8% +2.8%
17.1%
As part of user or
market research
26.9%
During business
stakeholder meetings
4.6%
Other
13.6%
During program
refinement
12.2%
During backlog
fulfillment
25.5%
During feature creation
When do you define the benefit hypothesis for new features?
Realization
It’s all very well being efficient and optimizing the work that delivers value to the
customer, but what if it isn’t valuable? If our investments in time, energy, and
technology are not effective, ultimately we don’t get to pay our bills and live our
lives. But nearly a quarter of our respondents aren’t even imagining what the
impact of their work will be; they are not building benefits hypotheses.
Benefits Hypotheses
There were no significant changes in this year’s data, although one notable piece
of data is the decline in the creation of business hypotheses, which is a trend in an
undesired direction. User stories are our preferred answer (italicized), as these are
usually the smallest granular piece of work; working with the smallest work items
is core to the principles of agility and flow. But all of these work items should have
been designed with a value-based outcome for the customer in mind. Those value-
based outcomes should be measurable as the contributing work is delivered.
The most popular response to the question “When do you define the benefit
hypothesis for new features?” is our least favorite answer since it tells us that
these teams aren’t yet autonomous, and the separation from the business is
persisting. This is also true for questions around reporting lines.

Leading Indicators Lagging Indicators
• Customer experience
• Journey time
• Session length
• Bounce rate
• Page views
• Conversions
• Basket size
• Referrals
• Reviews
• Social sentiment
• Revenue/sales
• Profit margin
• NPS
• Customer churn/turnover
• Customer adoption/retention
• Customer lifetime value
• Referrals
• Reviews
When do you measure the actual value created by
new features in your product? 2021 2022 +/-
Continually; it’s instrumented into the product or platform 12.73% 10.7% -2.03%
Repeatedly over time 16.36% 13.17% -3.19%
At the end of the experiment 14.18% 12.76% -1.42%
After a push to live 21.82% 24.69% +2.87%
At the end of a sprint 14.18% 11.52% -2.66%
At the end of the project 14.55% 21.4% +6.85%
14.7%
Revenue/Sales
12.8%
Profit margin
9.9%
Churn/Adoption
8.5%
Visitors
7.7%
Conversion rates
2.3%
Bounce rates
3.7%
Other
10.8%
NPS
4.5%
Referrals
6.5%
Reviews
5.7%
Session time
3.4%
Basket size
9.6%
Customer journey time
Which of the following value metrics does your team measure?
Customer Experience
VSM is predicated on the principle that if the customers like the products and services
the value stream delivers, they will continue to use them, pay for them, and recommend
them. If this holds true, then organization performance will be sustainable. To know how
customers are responding to changes in the product that are designed to improve their
experience, it’s necessary to measure the value realized. Yet only 6% of our respondents
currently do this, and 70% do it rarely or never.
Feedback Loops
We see a concerning trend in the data here, as we saw in the team types question, with a
slight decrease in the three top answers, increases for after a push to live and at the end
of the project. VSM, like agile and DevOps, centers around the move from waterfall, project
based thinking to a product centric way of working. Measuring value after a push to live
is problematic, because it appears to expect an instant response in customer experience,
but usually it will take some time before a customer interacts with the enhancement
or new feature. If experiments are taking place, then it indicates underlying benefits
hypotheses, so this is a strong answer. But we prefer continuous measurement that is
instrumented into the product or platform.
Business value metrics (revenue/sales and profit/margin) continue to top the charts
of value metrics that teams measure, but they aren’t customer value metrics—they are
lagging indicators for customer experience. While value may be in the eye of the beholder,
VSM can apply some universal logic. If customer experience is key, customer behavior
in response to a product change indicates if and how value is being received. Digital
products are inherently telemetric and have data signals that tell us who’s using it, for
how long, and whether they are doing the things we hoped they would.
NPS is also a popular metric, but surely reviews and referrals are better. They are both
leading and lagging indicators (NPS is just lagging and requires work to extract from
customers). They can be tracked easily, and referrals can be directly linked to revenue.

VSM practices and VSMP solutions are already providing benefits in terms of gaining
visibility and being able to inspect the technical health of our software delivery
streams. However their adoption is still focused on their efficiency, and less on their
actual realization of business value. I am hopeful that in the near future we will be
able to rebalance our approaches and even refocus them on delivering value to end
users. This focus is key to continuously improving value streams, removing one
constraint at a time, and achieving customer and business outcomes.
Patrice Corbard
Software Delivery Consultant & VSM Influencer, SD ReFocus
What This Means
The end goal of VSM is to have super happy customers loving their experience
with the results the value stream delivers. But if a value stream doesn’t know how
and what they are delivering, how will they hope to know what their customer
thinks? Value stream inspection is a must do way of working that enables
continuous adaptation and evolution of the value stream itself and its product.

12.2%
Leaders – we use an
organizational level
aggregate cycle time
20.3%
Teams – we empower
them with autonomy over
their own cycle time
38.7%
Both are equally important
2.3%
Other
26.6%
We don’t use cycle time
for measuring and
optimizing perofrmance
Is cycle time more important for leaders or teams when measuring and
optimizing performance in your organization?
4.0% % Complete & accurate
2.7% Code change size
4.7% Code delivery speed
2.2% Code refactor rate
1.9% Code review churn
4.7% Code quality
12.3%
Cycle time and/or
lead time and/or
flow time
9.8%
Throughput or
flow velocity
6.2% Flow distribution
5.4% Defect distribution
(bugs by severity)
6.2% Deploy frequency
Flow efficiency 7.6%
Work in progress (WIP)
or flow load 10.1%
Rework 4.6%
Touch/processing time 2.7%
Work profile 2.2%
None of these / Other 1.7%
Technical debt 5.2%
Wait/idle time 5.9%
Which value stream flow metrics does your team measure?
Adapting Value Streams
ADAPT: Use your insights to design and perform experiments that adapt
and optimize your flow so you can continually delight your customers.
For value stream management teams to adopt insights and analytics the teams
must gather, analyze and initiate actions, but to do so one needs metrics. Metrics
show what is working and what is not, at all levels. It is important to know which
metrics to use to focus and initiate the actions necessary for improvements. The
following are metrics which should be used to highlight bottlenecks in the delivery
and other phases of the value stream:
• Cycle time as a metric to measure the health of the value stream. Our survey
results show that the majority of survey respondents track cycle time as one of
the key metrics to measure and optimize the value streams. Cycle time—which
is the time from when an idea is registered with change to when it’s used by a
customer—is a health indicator for the value stream and measures its efficiency.
• Speed is good, but needs to be paired with quality. One should include quality
metrics to track whether the product or service is delivering the right solution
to customers or users. Additionally, bug ratio, number of defects during testing,
and the number of incidents in production are metrics which provide additional
insights into quality.
• Understanding customer experience. Other members, e.g., product owners,
marketers, sales and business leaders who are responsible for delivering
value are interested in business metrics. These metrics help to understand
how the product or service affects the performance of the business. These
typically include customer clicks, usage, customer happiness or NPS. Additional
insights around the application health introduced via application performance
management or observability solutions.
• Using tools to see what is important. While there is a tremendous amount
of data, a variety of these metrics can be automatically generated during each
phase of the value stream. While application development can instrument the
code during the design and development stage, and IT Operations has many
tools and platforms to generate ad hoc data or populate dashboards, it is
essential to keep in mind that the data can be overwhelming. The adoption of AI
and big data can help to find correlations and meaning in the vast amount of data
to take necessary actions or make adjustments across the value stream.

Less than 1 hour
Less than 1 day
Less than 1 week
Less than 1 month
More than 1 month
More than 3 months
More than 6 months
More than 12 months
30%
11%
7%
16%
28%
11%
6%
3%
4%
3%
5%
9%
18%
18%
18%
8%
7%
cycle time
lead time
Use both
lead &
cycle time Rank
Use only
lead time Rank
Time it takes to go from customer request to satisfaction 19% 1 17% 2
Time from idea to delivery of features to customers 16% 2 13% 4
Process time plus wait time 15% 3 22% 1
Customer’s view of the elapsed time from requesting a
capability to its release
15% 3 10% 6
Time from when a request arrives in the backlog until its
release in production
15% 3 14% 3
End-to-end, customer request to delivery for each activity 13% 6 9% 7
Time it takes to go from code committed to
code successfully running in production (DORA)
6% 7 13% 4
We established in our 2022 members-only microresearch "Definitions of Lead & Cycle Time"
that there is significant variation in these terms across the industry and within organizations:
• Nearly half of respondents said that they use both terms and have specific and different
meanings for each which is what we would recommend. But over half don’t use either
term, use both without distinction, or only use one.
• 70% of respondents who used both terms just had one definition for each which is ideal
to ensure that everyone knows what they are discussing when they use them. That does
still leave 30% open to confusion and misinterpretation when teams using these terms
have multiple possible definitions for them.
• We asked respondents to identify the definition from the list below which most closely fits
their definition of “lead time”, and a similar question for “cycle time”. As you can see in the
results, there was significant variation across the example definitions and no clear leader.
It was the same for Cycle Time.
Lead Time and Cycle Time
The VSM Consortium continues this research with the intention of publishing an open-
standard base definition as a starting point, with guidance on how to adapt it. Our 2021
report contains a discussion on the range of available start, and end points for measurement
in a value stream. We will continue to balance prescription (for clarity) with pragmatism (to
enable), in line with our mission to enable higher organizational performance.
For the purposes of this research, we defined the terms as:
• Lead time: time from code commit to in production.
• Cycle time: idea registered to change is used by customer.
As you would expect, cycle time is generally longer than lead time with these definitions.
Most respondents' lead times are under one month.
Lead and cycle time are used by more than 12% to measure value stream flow metrics.
Unfortunately, we do know that many times individuals get confused when trying to
differentiate between the two. Remember: focusing on cycle time will encourage the team
to finish something before they start something new, while focusing on lead time indicates
attention on getting work items already in the pipeline into the hands of customers. When
both are continuously measured and used, it can improve the time between a request and
the value delivered, impacting customer (internal or external) experience tremendously.

"We still struggle to get reliable data from systems involved in value stream management.
It takes time, quality, access, expertise, ownership, and clear guidance on good practices.
Tooling is improving, but data and usage are becoming more complex as well. We also
still struggle with clarity on lead and cycle times, our fundamental metrics. All of this is
improving over time, but we haven’t seen a breakthrough yet.
In regards to adapting organizations, we’re seeing significant progress in stream
alignment as a focus, and platform adoption to facilitate fast flow. Both of these trends
could result in more common understanding and new good practices that improve our
ability to measure effectively. Stay tuned!.
What This Means
Accelerate adaptation by balancing your attention to metrics across the different parts
of the value stream. While each silo has key metrics to measure their own activities,
they tend to focus on improving these rather than the flow across the value stream.
By inserting key metrics which measure speed, quality, and experience across all silos,
the goal of improving the work across the whole value stream becomes the shared
mission of all its members.

Key Takeaways
VSM is crossing the chasm. Our research highlights key findings along the VSM implementation journey, and shows that while
organizations have engaged in the vision and identification phases, there is more work to be done. We have seen no decline in the
interests and use of value stream mapping, but challenges arise from lack of skills, understanding, and leadership support. The
most compelling insight: leaders need help to chart their path of understanding, adopting, and practicing the art of VSM.
• Use value streams to break the business and technology silos. A value stream
starts with an idea and ends when the customer receives the value of that idea.
Value streams don’t recognize silos and don’t see any separation between technology
and the rest of the organization, which some might refer to as “the business”.
Value streams create autonomous, multi-functional teams that only care about how fast
they can deliver the best thing to the people that use it and pay for it.
• There’s nothing wrong with starting with a value stream mapping exercise.
Our VSM implementation roadmap’s entry point is setting the vision and goals, but we do
acknowledge that many organizations start with mapping a value stream which brings
together a variety of roles from different silos. Value stream mapping can range from
simple to complex, describing the current method by which products or services are
produced for customers. The team then can determine the target state of what it should
look like, and develop a hypothesis backlog and describes the activities needed to move
from the current state to the target state. Make sure that you have a cross-functional
team as this might be a unique time to see the end-to-end system, and with that comes
understanding. The collaborative work of mapping gives everyone the understanding of
each other's roles in delivering value and with that, you develop a common vision. This is
often the first step that may lead to organizing around a value stream more permanently,
and inspire other value streams to reimagine the way they work.
• Incorporate value stream management as a governance framework for agile
and DevOps. The goal of agile and DevOps initiatives is to eliminate silos and ensure
cross-functional collaboration while adopting automation to improve velocity, quality,
and reliability of products and services developed and delivered. Enterprise agility
means making this happen across an entire organization, ultimately fixing the common
disconnect between technology and the rest of “the business”. The key requirements for
VSM to be effective are the same. This makes VSM a key governance concept which will
empower organizations to not only create new value, but also help ensure continuous
improvement in their agile and DevOps practices.
• Treat VSM as an experiment. Leaders are realizing that they need to create value by
optimizing their technology delivery, not just simply delivering technology. The goal
should be to get the highest possible value from products or services aligning business
vision, strategies, and goals. While methodologies such as agile and DevOps may have
been implemented, there is often still a disconnect between software delivery and
the overall business value. Value stream management codifies the system, allowing
for continual optimization through monitoring and management of the end-to-end
processes, tasks, and owners. Organizations don’t have to adopt VSM wholesale from
day one—in fact, that might look a lot like a transformation program which is doomed
to failure due to its big-bang approach. Instead, learning from agile, treat adoption as
an evolutionary process driven by series of experiments. Start by bringing together a
small team, aligned around a specific product or service which might be a candidate for
optimization and experiment with VSM good practices. The team will learn how to make
the work visible, measure the flow, identify and fix bottlenecks, constraints and waste,
and be able to teach others the principles.
• Use metrics wisely. Lead time, cycle time, customer journey time, and revenue/sales
are a few metrics that are used within value stream management. But to effectively
measure, it is important to understand the actions the metrics will drive. There are
value metrics, progress metrics, and activity metrics. While value metrics deal mostly
with customer experience, progress metrics include customer journey time, activity
metrics are typically around time for key steps such as lead and cycle time. While there
should be a good balance, it is also essential to know that not all team members will be
motivated by the data. Some people may feel the visibility to be intrusive and are afraid
that the data can be used against them. Such situations must be avoided by ensuring
and developing a culture that encourages psychological safety, and collaborative
approaches enforced by leaders

What’s your best estimate for the number of employees in your org worldwide?
20.6%
50,000 or more employees
5.0%
25,000–49,999 employees
14.0%
1,000–4,999 employees
7.2%
10,000–24,999 employees
9.9%
5,000–9,999 employees
4.5%
Don’t know / not applicable
1-99 employees 18.0%
11.3%
100-499 employees
10.4%
500-999 employees
In which industry does your organization operate?
30.6%
Technology or software
14.4%
Financial services
(including banking
and insurance)
Healthcare 6.8%
13.1% Professional services
Government 7.3%
Not-for-profit 3.2%
Other 8.8%
Education 3.6%
Retail 3.6%
Manufacturing 6.8%
Demographics

The Value Stream Management Consortium is a member association for enterprises
and individuals working with value stream management practices and platforms.
Our purpose is to advance value stream-centric ways of working in technology teams
to lead to higher-performing organizations. Our mission is to cultivate and nurture
the emerging market for value stream management and to help the community learn,
devise practices and standards, and grow through their use.
Become a member at vsmconsortium.org

State of Value Stream Management Report 2022 by VSM Consortium

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