Full article with thanks to: forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2023/06/26/before-you-manage-others-manage-yourself-first/?sh=14ab35591b20
During the past several years, the digitisation of business processes accelerated more than anyone thought possible. Overall, these changes had a positive impact on businesses, enabling them to meet market demand, overcome staff and supply chain shortages and even find more efficient paths to market and revenue.
While the collective experience has been a testament to business resilience, these digital transformations have also created process roadblocks and siloed communications that are impacting the organisation’s ability to deliver value to the customer. As a result, enterprise leaders are focusing on increasing customer value.
Old challenges are new again.
Recently, my company, Broadcom, surveyed business and IT executives about their strategic goals and challenges and their adoption of value stream management (VSM). Not surprisingly, many of the same challenges they’ve been dealing with throughout the pandemic continue to dominate. The four biggest challenges cited by participants were managing supply chains—physical and digital—collecting data, inefficient processes and maximising remote worker productivity.
These persistent issues have been exacerbated by the strategies employed to keep business moving these past few years, such as remote work models, increased adoption of cloud services and reengineered supply chains. While necessary, these changes have often resulted in new or altered processes that aren’t as efficient or optimised as they need to be. These processes have also generated a return to the siloed operations we’ve all worked so hard to remove.
Customer value supplants speed to market.
Over the past few years, executives have focused on reducing costs as well as increasing productivity and time-to-market. That makes sense, given the nature of business and the challenges businesses have faced. So, it’s particularly telling that the top strategic focus in 2023 is increasing customer value.
This renewed focus on the customer is a natural evolution in the transformation journey we’ve been on. Every company, by necessity, shifted to survival mode, which meant they were focused internally. With brand loyalty on the line, business leaders are once again prioritising customer experiences and are looking for ways to improve processes to ensure they are delivering customer value. Value stream management is one approach to improving digital transformation initiatives.
According to Gartner, while a large majority of board directors say digital business is embedded in business growth strategies, just 35% say they have achieved or are on track to achieve digital transformation goals. The challenges to digital transformation success are well known and many involve lack of data, poor visibility and weak collaboration—the very same obstacles VSM helps overcome.
As I’ve written about before, VSM is a framework that helps organisations focus on delivering value to customers by enabling greater visibility through better access to data, closer collaboration across teams and clearer alignment between IT and the business. As such, VSM is a key to overcoming stubborn barriers that can plague the digital transformation process.
Five Steps For VSM Success
While its benefits are clear, VSM isn’t a one-and-done solution to improved customer value. It is both a strategy and a practice and requires an investment of time and dedication. With that in mind, here are five crucial steps to help achieve the potential upside:
1. True VSM starts with understanding how your organisation actually creates value—from initial concepts to revenue—and then organising around the people and teams that deliver value, not a collection of projects. The key to success here is to frame VSM as an enabler of other initiatives like DevOps and Agile. It’s an approach that fuels better alignment around strategic endeavours and leads to better business outcomes.
2. Tie business strategy and delivery together in singular value streams, so that when challenges arise or trade-offs need to be made, everyone is on the same page about the value they want to deliver and the progress toward it. It’s particularly important to be inclusive of every team to avoid bottlenecks down the road.
3. VSM provides the platform and data necessary to translate business strategies into work for delivery teams to execute, while simultaneously eliminating friction. Success is in the data, or rather access to consolidated, usable data that is connected to common goals. This ensures every person on every team understands how their work delivers value.
4. Determine the optimal way to get work done and provide visibility to improve collaboration and increase trust. Monitor work and steer execution to ensure prioritisation, urgency and allocations remain valid in the face of constantly changing demands. The biggest pitfall in this step is competing priorities. True VSM means continually prioritising based on value, and that often means renegotiating resource allocation.
5. Measure success and optimise the value stream to improve future work. This is essential to the success of current and future value streams.
Conclusion
According to research from VSM Consortium, VSM is gaining traction as an approach that can help overcome many of the obstacles that impede digital initiatives. This means that more organisations are beginning to adopt VSM to break down silos and improve collaboration and access to data.
As these organisations continue to mature in their implementations, they’ll realise greater organisational alignment, transparency and better decision-making. These benefits not only support digital transformation; they put customer value at its centre where it belongs.
Full article with thanks to: forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2023/06/26/before-you-manage-others-manage-yourself-first/?sh=14ab35591b20
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