The new solution, underpinned by the ConnectALL platform it acquired in June 2023, gathers, organizes and evaluates disparate DORA and flow metrics to provide real-time, role-based dashboards to development teams, dev managers and organization leaders to use for informed decision-making.  

“By integrating and organizing data from diverse sources across the value chain, ValueOps Insights provides the information organizations need to make better business decisions,” said Jean-Louis Vignaud, Head of ValueOps in Broadcom’s Agile Operations Division. The ability to match investment with the capability to deliver products leads to “successful value realization,” the company noted in its announcement.

This enables monitoring of investment decisions against product outcomes, and confirmation that planned product capabilities translate into tangible investment outcomes. By aligning investment intent with execution capability, we help organizations ensure successful value realization.

DORA and Flow metrics are all about delivery efficiency, but Vignaud noted, “that doesn’t mean we’re smart in what we do. The ideal view of the word is, ‘I plan for value, I deliver value and I measure the value realization.” While the full vision for Insights includes a value planning tool that will be integrated in the next quarter, Vignuad said, “We can start to be a bit smarter because of Flow analytics and DORA metrics.”

To broaden the value proposition, Broadcom is working on value realization. As Vignaud explained, “We capture early metrics, ensuring that indeed you are realizing the value you said you would be realizing when you do the investment.” 

One initiative closely aligned with customer value is value stream management (VSM). VSM spans the processes and people involved in the creation of a product or service, from the initial idea to the final delivery. It prioritizes visibility, alignment, and efficient processes, which all support the ultimate goal of delivering the most value to the customer. VSM platforms can help organizations measure customer value to ensure their efforts are meeting this important business objective. But how does a company measure customer value? What are the right metrics to track? And how does VSM help?

Why customer value?

We’re all familiar with the adage, “the customer is always right,” but that ideal isn’t always easy to achieve, especially when navigating conflicting priorities like budget cuts and the ever-increasing demand for more profits. If businesses learned anything during the COVID-19 pandemic it’s the critical importance of customer loyalty, and what better way to earn loyalty than by delivering customer value?

What is customer value? It’s different to every customer and organization, but on the surface, it’s how satisfied a customer is with the product or service you provide. Not surprisingly, measuring customer value is far more nuanced. One business may not be concerned with repeat business or loyalty because the nature of their product is one-time purchase. But they may be concerned about word of mouth. Meanwhile, other businesses may be hyper-aware of their social media reputation and take great pains to track and measure that engagement.

The 6 customer value metrics

As the saying goes, “you get what you measure.” That couldn’t be truer in the case of measuring customer value. After all, no customer is the same, and their experiences differ from one to the next. Customers have different ways of expressing their satisfaction or dissatisfaction, so it is not always easy to tell how they feel. That means you need to track satisfaction across several metrics.

In a recent survey, IT and business leaders were asked about their customer value measurement efforts. While 99 percent reported they are measuring customer value, only 5 percent were measuring all key metrics, meaning most have an incomplete or biased interpretation of customer value.

According to the Broadcom VSM maturity model, understanding and measuring customer value requires, at minimum, the following six key metrics.

1. Customer happiness – While a highly subjective metric, this focuses on direct customer feedback, surveys, NPS scores etc. 

2. Customer adoption – This one is more straightforward and looks at customer adoption of products and services or features.

3. Sales – Similarly, this metric demonstrates customers’ loyalty through net new purchases, renewals, maintained subscriptions, and other similar transactions.

4. Customer support – Often an important indication of dissatisfaction, this measurement tracks engagement with customer support.

5. OKRs focused on customer value – This metric looks at OKRs, KPIs and KPOs directly focused on unique product and services satisfaction.

6. Social media – Perhaps one of the more powerful indicators of customer satisfaction is their use of social media to either praise or recommend vendor products and service, or to complain or warn others prospective customers away.

Drive customer value with VSM

Customer value is the core tenet of value stream management. So, it’s no surprise that VSM both supports customer value and helps measure it. One of the cornerstones of VSM is driving efficiency with process, communication, data and more. This focus results in numerous benefits, including:

–       Reduces waste by helping the business connect investment planning to outputs and optimizing resources.

–       Improves speed to market by eliminating silos, reducing friction, and optimizing workflow.

–       Drives continuous improvement and enhances product quality, team productivity and morale through better capacity planning, resource management, and better communication and data visibility, helping to ensure a continuous feedback loop.

These benefits combine to help organizations drive value from establishing business objectives and investment plans to delivering products and services to customers – and every step in between. The ultimate goal is delivering more value to customers.

VSM helps measure what matters

VSM enables increased data visibility and communications across the business which supports the creation and measurement of customer value. However, measuring value is not a simple matter and organizations should not limit their scope to just one or two metrics. By measuring these six customer value metrics organizations gain a 360 degree view of customer value. Gaining a 360 degree view of customer value allows the business to gauge customer satisfaction at multiple points along the customer journey, not just at the beginning and conclusion of a sale. These six are a good place to start, but it’s best to evaluate the various ways your customers engage with the business to identify the metrics that will work best for you throughout your value stream.

To learn how value stream management helps some of the world’s leading organizations drive customer value, check out Broadcom’s annual VSM Summit on demand.

Recent research has shown VSM plays a critical role in ensuring that going fast and delivering more frequently also delivers a product that actually provides value. The techniques of value stream enable value to be seen, mapped to the goals of the business, then optimized by eliminating waste and removing roadblocks to deliver.

“There are more companies that are in the phase of using it with multiple product lines. And there’s more companies that are starting to use it and doing a POC with it,” explained Laureen Knudsen, Broadcom’s Chief Transformation Officer – AOD. “So we’re seeing that growth curve really starting to take off and happen in this past year than we have previously. It’s been snowballing and I think the results are what people are starting to pay attention to at this point.”

Value stream management seems to be following the path of both Agile and DevOps, which began as ways to more effectively build and deliver software and was then adopted and scaled throughout the organization to gain efficiencies and bring more stakeholders into the process.

“A lot of the noise in the market about value stream management really had to do with DevOps,” Knudsen said. “And I think that came from SAFe using value stream mapping in their DevOps course. But a lot of people were only using it in their DevOps processes. And then they realized, well, that’s not where the process starts. And if I’m talking about taking a systems view of how I create products, I need to start at the very beginning of the ideation phase, and move all the way through to ‘How did my customers perceive what I did?’ “

Since Agile development is not a prescriptive way to create software, some organizations are all in while others might only be doing Scrum yet believe they are Agile in their processes.

“Almost everybody today will tell you they’re agile, but whether they’re really following the principles of Agile remains to be seen,” Knudsen said. “A lot of them still don’t have data and transparency, which is fundamental to agility. I’m seeing companies that were taking this seriously, and really trying to fix all of the ills they had when they rolled out DevOps and they rolled out Agile, and it didn’t go very well. There’s a lot of companies that are saying, ‘Okay, we saw what we did before, and it didn’t work very well. And now we really want to get this right.’ And they’re using this to bring the entire organization together, and include everybody who’s involved in that process of product creation, whether it’s a legal approval of an open source product, or marketing, or an agent that has to know about what you’re creating to be able to do their job more fully. So it’s expanding out to reach everybody, and it’s being taken a lot more seriously.”

This year’s fourth iteration of VSM Virtual Summit – “Making Waves” – will feature speakers from Boston-based financial firm State Street Corp., vehicle transaction company Cox Automotive, and energy firm Southern Company, to speak about how value stream management has helped them efficiencies and deliver value to their customers.

Those speakers, as well as Broadcom’s experts, will provide real-world examples of findings that they have, both positive and challenges, and how they’ve overcome those challenges and  how they’re solving issues.

Knudsen said value stream management is not the same for organizations. “Everybody’s got slightly different things that they’ve overcome recently, that they end up talking about, but they’re all harnessing the power of that end-to-end view or the value stream management view to optimize their transformations. So that’s our focus at VSM Virtual Summit.”

Register for the April 24 event here, and even if you can’t make it, the event recording will be made available immediately after the Summit for on-demand viewing.

Of the 96% of responding companies that say they’ve undertaken a value stream management initiative, driving long-term customer value is their focus, according to the survey.

Value stream management is a process that involves spotting and eliminating bottlenecks in the development and delivery cycles with the result of continuously improving performance, quality and customer satisfaction.

“What we’re finding is that as companies are able to get things out to the market faster because they have that seamless integration from ideation to customer value realization, they’re able to understand more of what the customer is looking for and get that faster feedback loop,” Laureen Knudsen, chief transformation officer at Broadcom, told SD Times. “They’re having more interactions with the customers built into their processes as well.”

The survey found that organizations are extending their value stream initiatives, as companies report moving from early planning and piloting to using VSM for production. 

“It’s encouraging to see more organizations making strides in their VSM initiatives,” Jean-Louis Vignaud, Head of ValueOps, Agile Operations Division at Broadcom, said in a company announcement.. “VSM isn’t a quick fix initiative; it’s a journey. It takes time and effort to do it right, but when you do, it returns transformational improvements, and incredible ROI which is evident in the feedback from survey respondents. As teams realize the benefits of VSM and its positive impact on their business objectives, we anticipate even greater adoption and maturity throughout the enterprise.”

But VSM is not without its challenges. This year, for instance, respondents reported their top challenges as inefficient processes (49%), and then collecting data, measuring customer value and having siloed teams (all at 40%).

Another hurdle organizations must overcome is not having the right teams – or enough teams involved in VSM to give organizations a broader view of product management. By not involving more teams, the report noted, siloed environments are sustained and visibility and alignment are reduced. “What we see is value stream management as the overarching framework across all of these individual processes,” Knudsen said.

“We talk about strategic product management, we talk about DevOps, the development teams, and how do you make them more efficient and effective, and their work visible to leadership,” she continued. “We really talk to the entire organization, and all of those pieces underneath are sort of under this umbrella of value stream management… that’s the end-to-end flow. So you have a framework at the top, that high-level view, and then you have individual processes that go deep within those parts of the organization, like how the security department does security, but everyone else in the company may not need to have that same level of understanding. So there’s a higher level view that everyone needs, and then it’s the details within the individual groupings.”

To learn how value stream management drives digital transformation and customer value, download the complete research paper here.

According to a recent survey from Broadcom, more than two-thirds of respondents claimed that their visibility isn’t what it should be. In addition, the majority of companies are missing a key characteristic of mature VSM organizations, which is the continuous availability of data. Sixty-nine percent say they share their VSM metrics only quarterly or monthly. Only 9% continuously share data.

Just 2% of respondents to the survey consider themselves to be at a level of VSM maturity, where they are using VSM on all of their products. Sixty percent are in the early adoption stage, 13% are in planning, and 25% have a pilot project. In addition, 23% are only running VSM on a single product. “While organizations acknowledge the significance of VSM, a substantial portion find themselves in the early phases of adoption. This survey indicates a growing interest in ongoing performance improvements and aspiration for holistic, enterprise-wide visibility, alignment and efficiency to increase customer value,” said Jean-Louis Vignaud, head of ValueOps at Broadcom.

The survey also pointed out peoples’ challenges with mapping metrics to value. Sixty-three percent say their metrics aren’t mapped to product performance, and 11% say their companies don’t provide business metrics for measuring products. Decision making still remains largely centralized as well, with 85% of decisions either being made at the leadership level or requiring leadership approval before proceeding.

To help companies better assess their maturity with VSM, Broadcom has now announced the Value Stream Management Maturity Model, which was created based on the survey results. The model provides insights, guidance, and actionable steps to help companies meet their VSM goals. It includes five levels: Foundational, Value Stream Aware, Collaborative and Visible, Data-Driven, and Full Transparency and Flow.

“Value stream management has become a pivotal strategy for digital transformation, but success requires that teams understand where they’re at and where they’re going,” said Vignaud. “To help enterprise teams on their VSM journey, we developed a progressive model that defines maturity from the early stages focused on breaking down silos to full maturity, delineated by data-driven alignment and an established culture of continuous improvement. Our hope is this model will serve as a guide for organizations as they progress along their digital transformation journey.”

According to the VSM Consortium’s 2023 State of Value Stream Management Report, 85% of survey respondents create a value hypothesis, a number that has steadily been increasing year-over-year. The group believes the growth is an indicator that “the market is increasingly making the connection between planning and delivery, and thinking about the value of an idea as soon as it emerges,” it wrote in the report.  

The VSM Consortium found that the bigger a project is, the more likely it is to have a value hypothesis associated with it. The proportion of value hypotheses created for capabilities and initiatives, in particular, grew significantly compared with the past two years. In 2021 and 2022, 19% and 17%, respectively, of value hypotheses were for capabilities and initiatives, and in 2023 that rose to 29%. 

Another finding of the report is that low performers are less likely to create these value hypotheses at the start and instead will do it later in the process, during feature creation. Elite performers are more likely to create a value hypothesis during business stakeholder meetings or as part of market research — both much earlier in the development process. 

“This suggests that higher performing organizations understand and manage the granularity of their work and how it travels through the value stream,” the VSM Consortium concluded. 

More and more companies are adopting value stream management, too. Compared to 2022, teams are twice as likely to organize around their value streams.

When looking at performance levels, the VSM Consortium determined that elite and high performers are three to four times more likely to align people with value streams.

“One of the paramount signs that VSM is starting to move past the early adopters is the increasing percentage of organizations reporting that they are changing their organizational structure. After years of experimentation, organizations are now starting to truly adopt the principles of VSM and do the work required to fully reap the benefits,” Ted Sapountzis, a VSM Consortium board member and group vice president of product and customer marketing at Planview.

Finally the report found that organizations have started to reduce the number of tools they work with. In 2021, only 13.5% of organizations reported using only one tool, and now in 2023 it has risen to more than a third of companies. 

However, the VSM Consortium also highlighted that one of the challenges that companies will face in the years ahead is integrating tools, because currently there is no standardization around integrating VSM tools. This is something that the OASIS Open VSM Interoperability Technical Committee is working to address. 

The full report can be accessed here.

“When we start thinking about ways to line up all of the essential steps needed to get a job done into a steady, continuous flow, it changes everything.”

— James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones, Lean Thinking

To remain competitive in the digital age, enterprises must respond to market changes quickly. This is the central theme of SAFe, to deliver a continuous flow of value to customers in the ‘shortest sustainable lead time.’ This article describes the strategies and techniques that organizations can apply to achieve this goal.

What is Flow?

Flow is characterized by a smooth transition of work through the entire value stream with a minimum of handoffs, delays, and rework. Value flow systems have eight common properties, as illustrated in Figure 1.

Each is described briefly below:

1. Work in process. There is always some work moving through the system; if there weren’t, there would be no flow of value.
2. Bottlenecks. In every flow system, one or more bottlenecks may limit value flow through the entire system.
3. Handoffs. If one person could do all the work, handoffs would be unnecessary. But, in any material flow system, different individuals and teams have different skills and responsibilities. Each plays a role in advancing a work item through the system.
4. Feedback. Customer and stakeholder feedback is necessary for efficiency and for effective outcomes. Ideally, feedback happens throughout the entire process.
5. Batch. Since any system has a finite capacity, all the work can’t be done at once. Therefore, work occurs in batches, designed to be as efficient as possible.
6. Queue. It all starts with a set of assignments. In addition, each value stream needs a mechanism prioritizing the sequence of work for optimal value.
7. Worker. People do the critical work of moving work items from one state to another.
8. Policies. Policies are essential to flow. Local policies determine how a work item moves from step to step. Global policies govern how work is performed throughout the company.

The eight flow accelerators

Each flow property is subject to optimizations. Making value flow without interruptions is best achieved by adopting the eight ‘flow accelerators.’

#1 Visualize and Limit WIP

Too much Work in Process (WIP) confuses priorities, causes frequent context switching, and increases overhead. The first corrective action is to make the current WIP visible to all stakeholders with a simple Kanban board. The next step is to balance the amount of WIP against the available development capacity. 

#2 Address Bottlenecks

Wherever people or resources (systems, materials, and so on) experience greater demand than the capacity available, bottlenecks occur in the flow of value. To address them, additional skills, people, or other resources must be added at the bottleneck.

#3 Minimize Handoffs and Dependencies

Handoffs occur when work passes from one individual or team to another. Dependencies occur when teams can’t finish their work without help from other teams. Building cross-functional teams and ARTs — with all the necessary knowledge, resources, skills, and decision-making authority — creates an end-to-end flow of value that minimizes both.  

#4 Get Faster Feedback

Applying the basic Plan-Do-Check-Adjust (PDCA) learning cycle enables fast feedback. Solution builders need two types of feedback from each PDCA cycle: feedback about building the right thing and feedback about building it right.

#5 Work in Smaller Batches

Smaller batches go through the system faster and with less variability, fostering faster learning. Reducing batch size typically involves investment in automating the Continuous Delivery Pipeline (CDP), including infrastructure and automation, continuous integration, builds, regression testing, and more. 

#6 Reduce Queue Length

The longer the queue of committed work awaiting implementation, the longer the delay for new features, regardless of the team’s efficiency. Reducing queue length decreases wait time, reduces waste, increases flow, and improves predictability. 

#7 Optimize Time ‘In the Zone’

People and teams ‘in the ‘zone’ demonstrate higher creativity, productivity, happiness, and fulfillment. There’s an essential connection between creating a work environment where individuals and teams can maximize their time in the zone and accelerating the continuous flow of value. 

#8 Remediate Legacy Policies and Practices

During or after a Lean-Agile transformation, enterprises must remain vigilant for legacy policies and practices that inhibit flow. Examples include:

• Phase-gate milestones
• Unnecessary change control boards
• Obsolete tech standards
• Timesheet reporting 
• Traditional performance reviews 

They must be discovered, eliminated, modified, or mitigated.

These eight flow accelerators help teams increase throughput and deliver value faster. As an added benefit, implementing them gives people a sense of control over the process and triggers rapid and measurable improvements in customer satisfaction and employee engagement.

They want to know that what they’re working on aligns with business goals over the long term, that their resources are channeled properly, and what impediments are blocking their achievement of those goals.

To that end, Atlassian is announcing its Value Stream Management solution, built on its Jira Align tool that has helped companies scale their agile efforts enterprise-wide.

“The value of Jira Align is about connecting the dots, from tracking work in Jira Software or Azure DevOps,” explained Natalia Baryshnikova, general manager and head of product, Enterprise Agility at Atlassian. “Jira Align truly embodies the philosophy of Atlassian called the open tool chains,” with integrations to Atlassian tools and others.

Baryshnikova said that whatever work you do on a team level, “we can roll it up and we can connect into the holistic picture.” That capability, she added, plays well with value stream management … because in order to be efficient, you need to be efficient on multiple levels of the organization. “You have a concept of a team-level efficiency, you have a concept of efficiency across teams, and then overall, you can measure and evaluate values streams that you define on those different hierarchical levels of the organization,” she noted. 

When the Value Stream Management solution update becomes generally available next month, it will feature more than 20 out-of-the-box dashboard templates for measuring progress against milestones set by the organization. Those dashboards can be seen in Atlassian Analytics, the company’s visualization platform released in July that connects data from Atlassian’s tools and those of third parties, and also in Enterprise Insights with Jira Align, according to the company’s announcement. 

Further, the company pointed out that it is seeing customers taking an emerging interest in using Confluence Whiteboards, currently in the early access program, for value mapping and creating value stream templates. 

Among the benefits, Atlassian detailed in a blog announcing the release, are:

• Get end-to-end visibility across your organization, from high-level insights to granular details, using data from multiple sources to get comprehensive reporting.
• Align work to outcomes, like OKRs, to surface non-value-add work and show a value stream’s impact.
• Streamline processes and eliminate bottlenecks by identifying dependencies and roadblocks, automating manual tasks, removing unnecessary steps, and stopping wasting resources.
• Measure the right things to set your team up for success by analyzing important metrics, such as team efficiency, customer impact, and software reliability and performance.
• Bring business, DevOps, and IT teams together to develop innovative software – from concept through delivery – with shared data and cross-functional teams.

“We worked with some of our customers of Jira Align, who have been investigating for a while and forming opinions about how do I do value stream management?” Baryshnikova said. “A lot of organizations that come to us say, I’ve heard about value stream management, how do I do it, and we send them to read books. But this solution gives you an immediate out-of-the-box [starting point], which you can evolve, because it’s very customizable to make it your own.” 

Flow metrics can enable companies to determine if all of that orchestration is actually running through the process, and if the company is being efficient in its processes. Ultimately, it can help the company determine if it is realizing value and better understand how to get that value into the hands of customers sooner.

“It’s great that we have these ideas, but how do we actually close the loop and take it down to the end,” said Hersh Tapadia, co-founder and CEO at value stream intelligence company Allstacks. The flow metrics, he said, “are closing the loop. It’s realizing the dream, as we might say.”

SAFe’s idea of flow metrics and the value stream management idea of flow have something in common, Tapadia said – they’re still in the treetops. From the high-level view of all the pillars in the organization, it’s difficult to know if the correct information is flowing through those pillars, or if work is flowing through them. It’s difficult to see where the handoffs are, and where things are getting stuck.

Tapadia used the example of the handoff between product teams and engineering teams. “We have some idea, we go to build it,” he said. “And there’s a break there. Our flow efficiency or flow rate isn’t exactly where we want it to be. So maybe we say we need to get better at the product/engineering handoff, or maybe our problem is that we need to be more Agile. So we go through this big Agile transformation. Well, that’s kind of a blunt instrument. That’s not to say it’s not the right, ultimate end game. But if we can leverage these concepts of flow to then apply more incremental changes, that might ultimately end up with us being in the same place.”

According to Tapadia, Allstacks takes the high-level concept of flow and breaks it down into constituent parts. As an example, he said. “We can see, ‘Oh, the reason why this product engineering handoff is getting slowed down is because we see that in the phase when the requirements are getting accepted by engineering that they’re broken down into tickets to be worked on in sprints.’ There’s this back and forth churn, and in that moment, are we asking, ‘Do we really understand the intent of this ticket? What are the acceptance criteria? Is this the smallest slice we could take?'” Flow metrics present data in a way that enables engineering leaders and their teams to ask the right questions with the end goal of understanding “how do we actually improve?”

He went on to say that the viewpoint of Allstacks is the fact that SAFe has introduced flow into its framework is important to contextualize why we’re trying to make these incremental efficiency gains. “The important perspective that we have on this is, it’s important to start from the bottom and represent it at the top, not start from the top and then try to fix it going down.”

One area that Tapadia says seems to always have friction around it is code review. Code review is a common “wait state” throughout the development process, where progress halts and a subset of code sits and waits to be reviewed by an engineer’s peers to assure quality or identify bugs. “Developers write code, and it gets stuck in code review and QA. So you say, ‘Oh, do we need more QA people? Do we need to change the process, or add more automated testing?'” 

He said it turns out that what’s actually happening on most teams is, on a team of seven, two developers are doing the majority of code review. The other five are doing it as well, but they don’t realize that they’re doing one a week while the other two are doing 10 a week. “Even if that gets evened out, that can double the throughput of a team, just by making that small change.”

Tapadia said what he’s most excited about the addition of flow metrics into SAFe 6 is that those metrics can be contextualized in the business value that they have up top, and “that’s how this loop finally gets closed,” he said. “And that’s how this becomes really salient.”

For more information on flow metrics and how to make the most of them, see the Allstacks guide to understanding flow metrics. 

The end-goal is to enable better customer experiences  – that is the VALUE in value stream management. To get there though, we need unprecedented levels of visibility – the kind of end-to-end visibility that generates actionable insights in minutes. Value stream management makes this possible. And this is precisely why it is so exciting.

Visibility Powers Smoother Customer Experiences

If you’ve experienced a flight delay recently, you might have found the experience to be a bit smoother than it was in the past. Airlines – at least those more focused on customer experience – have found ways to connect the information they have available from different systems to improve this experience and reduce the overhead on their teams. 

For example: If you’re going to miss your connecting flight, the airline knows this – and can send you a link via text message within minutes of landing to rebook to a later flight. No waiting in a long customer service line, no sitting on the phone for hours. Speedy visibility, real-time resolution. 

It makes you realize: Anybody that looks at value stream management and doesn’t see the value of it, isn’t seeing the customer value it makes possible. 

Companies have been investing in agility for decades now. They’ve been spending on tools and coaching and process improvement to fulfill this promise of business agility, but many have yet to realize the customer or internal business value from it. Agile software development practices accelerate only a relatively small part of the end-to-end product lifecycle, ignoring the larger amounts of time and waste before and after the software development portion. Agile development isn’t the destination and is a necessary but not sufficient enabler of value realization.

But it’s time to start realizing value. The technology is there, the raw materials are there – the visibility that drives true value could be there too. Software development should no longer be a black box. We’ve proven it can be cracked open, and we have the data science, machine learning, AI and benchmarking across industries to back it up.

Unlocking Real-Time Visibility with Strategic Portfolio Management

Organizations that are starting to experience unprecedented growth in 2023 are hindered by a lack of visibility into their programs, products, and projects. This makes it difficult to effectively govern that growth – funding decisions are made by different groups and different stakeholders, while being documented in SharePoint, a homegrown website, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint, and coffee shop napkins. 

RELATED CONTENT: Planview’s Mik Kersten on the state of Project to Product

All that said, the pressure for digital innovation and alignment across teams is mounting. It requires more than just improvement in project management; it requires AI-enabled solutions that focus on product output by fusing different perspectives, allowing for capacity and scenario planning, and generating real-time dashboards and reports to inform data-driven decision-making.

As of now, less than 10% of organizations undergoing digital transformation efforts at scale have operationalized the shift from projects to products, leaving more than 90% yet to capture its full value. In addition, only 8% of what’s planned by IT and software development teams actually gets delivered – a clear disconnect that leads to company-wide inefficiency that can no longer be ignored. 

The integration adoption of strategic portfolio management solutions provides a single source of truth, enabling organizations to implement proactive strategy and investment planning, transparency in execution process support, financial management of investments, and enterprise governance support. 

This gives executive leadership real-time access into the status of ongoing initiatives and can quickly determine if they are on track, behind, or ahead of schedule. This saves them time, as they no longer need to gather data from various sources. Leadership can instead focus on goal-oriented KPIs – allowing data to determine if they should continue, alter, or increase spending on digital transformation initiatives.

Don’t Sell Visibility Short

Just like airlines can use real-time data to improve the flight delay experience, companies like UPS can leverage the power of visibility to create value at scale. 

And this is the power of visibility in 2023. 

If your Agile transformation has failed to deliver customer value or you’ve begun value stream management in your organization and have yet to see the kind of groundbreaking results you were hoping to achieve, don’t give up yet. You’re not alone. Like so many of the 3,600 software development value streams surveyed to create the Project to Product: State of the Industry report, you simply have yet to operationalize your project to product transformation.  

Now it’s time to connect the dots on decisions made across portfolios, value streams and teams.