Four Key Techniques for Accelerating Speed to Market with ValueOps

Speed bumps. Whether you love them or detest them, you have to admit they work: we either slow down or feel the consequences.
Speed bumps are also a common presence in many enterprises today, which is decidedly a bad thing. These are the obstacles that slow progress and derail initiatives.

Eliminating these obstacles is an imperative. Today, speeding time to market and boosting agility are key imperatives for businesses in just about any industry. The organizations that rise to meet today’s need for speed can boost profits, market share, and customer loyalty.

Here are four common obstacles that stymie an organization’s speed and agility, and a quick description of how ValueOps by Broadcom helps teams overcome these obstacles.

Obstacle 1: Inconsistent direction

The challenge

Within many organizations, there’s a lack of unified alignment around key objectives. This lack of alignment leads to time and money being spent on the wrong efforts—creating waste and inefficiency that slow progress.

How ValueOps can help

To speed execution and innovation, it is essential to start by ensuring that all aspects of your organization— objectives, processes, resources, and activities—are aligned and operating cohesively towards the achievement of overall strategic goals.

ValueOps helps to orchestrate this alignment across organizational tiers. Irrespective of the specific objectives set at different levels, ValueOps ensures their alignment with the overarching corporate mission. A vital aspect of this framework is the seamless propagation of these strategic objectives to delivery teams. It creates alignment by ensuring that the individuals responsible for executing the work  have a thorough understanding of what corporate goals they are supporting, which is a great intrinsic motivator for the workforce.

Obstacle 2: Poor planning

The challenge

Once teams have defined and communicated a strategic direction and objectives, it is essential to establish a realistic delivery plan for each value stream. When teams lack effective plans, it means funds, people, and other resources aren’t being employed to maximum advantage.

How ValueOps can help

ValueOps provides all the information that is relevant for planning individual product iterations as well as larger initiatives on a multiyear horizon.  Accurate insight into the available capacity, completed work, dependencies, team velocity and many more artifacts facilitate data-driven decisions that enhance predictability into when new products/features can realistically be brought to market.

The solution fosters alignment throughout the value stream by connected planning, helping all contributors to synchronize their activities effectively while not losing sight of corporate strategy.

Obstacle 3: Suboptimal capacity and team management

The challenge

Effectively managing resources while maintaining innovation and productivity can be daunting. Many groups lack the ability to effectively balance workloads and dependencies across multiple value streams, which leads to inefficiency, poor resource utilization, and delays.

How ValueOps can help

ValueOps enables delivery leaders to gauge how much work can be accommodated within a Program Increment (PI) or release. This critical feature enables managers to build comprehensive capacity plans that reflect the amount of work that can realistically be completed for each release. By optimizing capacity management in this way, delivery leaders can ensure that available resources are being optimally utilized to maximize delivery speed, without having a negative impact on quality or team morale.

Obstacle 4: Ineffective release management

The challenge

In the race to bring innovations to market swiftly, effective release management is a must. However, many business and delivery executives lack timely insights into delivery status and risks, which leaves them poorly equipped to collaborate, set expectations, and prioritize intelligently.

How ValueOps can help

With ValueOps, teams can move from fragmented release management practices and towards a cohesive and collaborative methodology.  The solution features powerful integration and automation capabilities, which automate synchronization, monitoring, data collection, and more. By offering standardized views that visualize cross team workloads, dependencies and progress, it empowers teams to streamline activities, eliminate waste, and enhance speed to market. By optimizing release management with ValueOps, organizations can achieve enhanced visibility and collaboration in their value streams.

ValueOps in action: Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) was founded in 1884, and today is a world leader in patient care, research, and education programs. A few years ago, MSK resolved to start a journey to create a new digital patient care model rooted in its history of providing excellent patient care.

MSK also wanted to use artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) to leverage their research data to better answer patient inquiries and assist with possible treatments for cancer patients. MSK recognized it was important to provide more digital user experiences because their patients were becoming more digitally savvy and expected electronic management, communication, and interaction with health care facilities.

As MSK embarked on this journey, it recognized it needed to find a new way of working that allowed it to pivot quickly to provide these new digital customer experiences for their patients. So, it embraced Value Stream Management (VSM) to create the transparency, alignment, and efficiency it needed to deliver these new digital customer experiences quickly to its patients.

MSK implemented ValueOps as its VSM solution. They chose the solution based on its ability to aggregate data across the teams in its value streams. With the solution, they could establish a single source of truth for managing the delivery of the work needed to achieve their strategic objectives. ValueOps enabled leaders to recognize the cross-team dependencies and other risks that might delay the delivery of work and create effective mitigation plans. Additionally, MSK leaders used such data as team flow metrics to identify and remove inefficiencies within their value streams.

Conclusion

Speed to market is critical for unlocking new opportunities, fueling growth, and creating customer value. The ability to rapidly deliver innovation enables your enterprise to build the distinctive products and services that set it apart from the competition. To learn more about how ValueOps can help your organization achieve the speed it needs, be sure to download our complete Improve Speed to Market white paper.