From Code to Cash: Charting Your Course to True Software Value Realization

In today's digital-first world, software isn't just supporting the business; it is the business. Trillions are invested annually in developing and enhancing digital products and platforms. Yet, a persistent, nagging question echoes through boardrooms and team stand-ups alike: "Are we truly realizing the intended value from these massive software investments?"

The journey from a brilliant idea to tangible business impact—be it increased revenue, higher margins, greater market share, or delighted customers—is fraught with complexity. This is the essence of value realization: ensuring that the resources poured into software development translate into measurable, meaningful outcomes.

One of the most common, yet often underestimated, impediments to effective value realization lies not in the market or the strategy, but deep within our delivery capabilities. Even the most innovative digital product will fail to deliver its potential value if it’s plagued by slow development cycles, quality issues, or an inability to adapt to user feedback swiftly.

But how do you evolve from focusing solely on shipping features to genuinely engineering value? We believe it's a progressive journey:

1. Delivery excellence: First, master the art of delivering software efficiently, predictably, and with high quality. This forms the bedrock.
2. Customer value realization: Next, ensure this efficiently delivered software actually creates value for the customer—solving their problems, making their lives easier, and earning their satisfaction and loyalty.
3. Business value realization: Finally, connect this customer value directly to tangible business outcomes—the revenue, profit, and strategic goals your organization lives by.

This journey starts with taming the delivery beast. And for many organizations already leveraging powerful Agile management tools like Broadcom's Rally Software® or Atlassian's Jira, the path to enhanced delivery excellence might be closer and more data-driven than you think.

The Agile leader's dilemma: Drowning in data, starving for delivery insight

Agile leaders—VPs of engineering, development managers, release train engineers (RTEs), Agile coaches—are at the forefront of driving delivery excellence. You've embraced Agile, meticulously configured Rally or Jira, and your teams are executing sprints and PIs. You have dashboards, charts, and a wealth of data at your fingertips. Yet, common frustrations persist:

• Reactive firefighting, not proactive steering: Traditional Agile reports (burndowns, CFDs) tell you what has happened. They are lagging indicators. By the time a problem is evident in these reports—a missed iteration goal, a blown cycle time target—it's often too late to take effective corrective action without significant disruption. You're managing by looking in the rearview mirror.
• Siloed perceptions of performance: Rally and Jira are fantastic for planning and tracking work. But their data, while rich, often remains isolated from the broader operational and business context. Furthermore, the leading indicators of future performance—the subtle shifts in work in progress (WIP), the aging of blocked items, the quality signals from development tools—aren't always surfaced in a way that predicts future outcomes.
• Difficulty quantifying improvement impacts: You champion initiatives to improve flow, reduce WIP, or enhance quality. But it’s challenging to directly and continuously measure the impact of these changes on key delivery outcomes like cycle time or throughput, making it hard to prove their worth or know what to adjust next.
• Outputs over outcomes: The focus can inadvertently drift towards outputs (story points completed, features shipped) rather than the crucial delivery outcomes (predictable flow, reliable release cadence, minimal change failure rates) that truly underpin value.

What if you could transform your existing Rally or Jira data into a predictive crystal ball for delivery excellence?

Introducing your predictive co-pilot: Broadcom's ValueOps Insights

This is where ValueOps Insights, part of Broadcom's ValueOps value stream, enters the picture. We understand that your journey to full-fledged value realization begins with solidifying your delivery engine. That’s why we’re proposing a compelling starting point: leveraging ValueOps Insights, initially with your existing Rally or Jira data, to bring predictive power to your delivery excellence initiatives.

Imagine being able to achieve these objectives:

1. Define key delivery outcomes: Clearly articulate what "delivery excellence" means for you. Is it reducing average feature cycle time by 15%? Is it improving your PI commitment reliability to 90%? Is it lowering your change failure rate to below 5%?
2. Identify leading indicators—from data you already have: For each outcome, ValueOps Insights helps you map the leading indicators that influence it. The best part? You can start with data directly from Rally or Jira.
   • Want to predict cycle time? Leading indicators from Rally could include current WIP levels, average work item age, frequency and duration of blockers, and task handoffs.
   • Concerned about throughput? Leading indicators from Rally might be the stability of your WIP, the rate of items clearing critical upstream gates, or the resolution rate of blocked items.
   • Aiming to improve change failure rate? Rally data like defect density associated with recent features, or the rate of reopened items, can serve as initial leading indicators.
3. Get continuous, predictive confidence scores: Instead of waiting for the end of the PI or release, ValueOps Insights continuously analyzes these leading indicators from Rally/Jira and provides a predictive confidence score. You’ll see, in near real-time, whether you’re on track to meet your delivery outcomes, or if risks are emerging.
4. Understand the "why": When a risk score changes, ValueOps Insights can help pinpoint which leading indicators (such as a sudden spike in WIP or a critical item blocked for too long) are driving that change, allowing for targeted interventions.

This initial phase is designed for rapid adoption and immediate value. For existing Rally Software customers, we're making it even easier to get started by offering a way to use ValueOps Insights to unlock these delivery-focused predictions. Because ValueOps Insights leverages the same user credentials and has native access to Rally data, the barrier to entry is incredibly low.

The first horizon: Predictable delivery, proactive management

By focusing ValueOps Insights on your Rally or Jira data for delivery excellence, you unlock immediate and tangible benefits:

• Shift from reactive to proactive: Gain early warnings about potential delays or risks to your delivery goals, allowing you to intervene before they derail your plans.
• Employ data-driven coaching and improvement: Use predictive insights to have more impactful conversations with teams. Show them quantitatively how managing WIP or addressing aged items (all tracked in Rally or Jira) directly impacts their ability to meet objectives.
• Enhance predictability: Build more confidence in your release forecasts and PI commitments by understanding the underlying flow dynamics and their predictive influence.
• Maximize your existing tooling investment: Extract even more value from the rich data already residing within your Agile management tools.
• Reduce surprises: Fewer last-minute scrambles and a more stable, predictable delivery rhythm.

And this is just the beginning. Once you're comfortable using ValueOps Insights to predict and manage delivery outcomes with Rally/Jira data, the journey naturally expands. You can start pulling in additional leading indicator data from third-party delivery tools—think commit frequency and PR cycle times from GitHub/GitLab, build durations and success rates from Jenkins or Azure DevOps, or code quality metrics from SonarQube. This richer dataset further refines the accuracy of your delivery outcome predictions within ValueOps Insights. (Broadcom's ConnectAll can be a key enabler for integrating these diverse data sources.)

The evolving journey: From delivery excellence to true value realization

Mastering the prediction and improvement of delivery excellence outcomes is the crucial first step. The ValueOps Insights solution framework—defining outcomes, mapping leading indicators, and tracking predictive confidence—is designed to evolve with you.

Next stop: Connecting delivery to customer value

Once your delivery engine is humming with predictability, the next question is: "Is this high-performing delivery process creating things that customers actually value?"

This is where you extend ValueOps Insights to incorporate leading indicators of customer value realization. You'll start pulling in data from:

• Digital product analytics (DPA) tools (like Pendo, Amplitude, Mixpanel): Track feature adoption, user engagement, task completion rates, and user journey friction.
• Survey and feedback tools: Monitor Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer satisfaction (CSAT), and customer effort score (CES).
• Support systems: Analyze ticket volumes and sentiment related to new releases or features.

Within ValueOps Insights, you can then start mapping how your delivery excellence outcomes (such as faster feature cycle time and lower change failure rate) influence these customer outcomes. For instance:

• Does a 20% improvement in feature cycle time (your delivery outcome) lead to a 10% increase in new feature adoption (your customer outcome) within the first month?
• Does a reduction in change failure rate correlate with an uplift in NPS scores?

By establishing these connections, you start to see how your engineering efforts directly impact the user experience and customer happiness.

Final destination: Linking customer success to business value

With a clear line of sight from delivery to customer value, the final step is to connect customer success to the ultimate arbiter: business value realization.

Here, ValueOps Insights helps you integrate leading indicators from:

• CRM systems: Track renewal rates, upsell/cross-sell activity, and sales cycle length.
• Financial systems: Monitor revenue growth, margin improvements, and customer lifetime value (CLTV) associated with specific products or segments.
• Strategic portfolio management tools (like Broadcom's Clarity™): Link all this back to the strategic objectives and financial targets defined for your digital investments.

Now, the picture becomes complete. You can model and predict how:

• Improved feature adoption (customer outcome), driven by better delivery excellence, influences subscription revenue growth (business outcome).
• Higher NPS scores (customer outcome) impact customer churn reduction and CLTV (business outcomes).
• Faster time-to-market for critical capabilities (delivery outcome) helps achieve market share gains (business outcome).

This holistic view, from code commit to cash in the bank, all underpinned by a continuous, predictive engine, is the promise of true value realization.

Start your journey today with ValueOps Insights

The path to comprehensive value realization is an evolution, not an overnight transformation. It begins with a commitment to understanding and mastering the levers within your control. For most Agile organizations, that starting point is delivery excellence.

ValueOps Insights provides the framework and the predictive power to embark on this journey with confidence. By first focusing on the data you already have in Rally Software or Jira, you can achieve quick wins, build data literacy, and cultivate a culture of proactive, outcome-driven delivery.

Ready to transform your delivery predictability and take the first step towards genuine software value realization? Explore how ValueOps Insights can become your predictive co-pilot, turning your existing Agile management data into your most powerful asset for future success.