Leveraging Value Streams to Fuel Long-Term Continuous Improvement

A lot has changed in recent years, and the pace only seems to keep accelerating. Competitive landscapes, technological advancements, customer preferences, and more all continue to shift ever more rapidly.

To keep pace, teams across enterprises must develop a culture and mindset focused on continuous improvement. They must constantly evolve processes, investments, strategies, and more. It is only through continuous improvement that groups can remain focused on optimizing the delivery of value to the customer, while navigating ever-changing environments.

However, as they seek to foster this ongoing improvement, teams in many organizations encounter significant obstacles:

• Internal stagnation. When organizations stagnate and fail to progress, there is a significant impact on near-term productivity and long-term adaptability. This situation is prevalent for a very clear reason: Organizational structures typically encourage this stagnation. Instead of being oriented around the needs of customers, these structures are built around the needs of internal functions. So too are goals, compensation, and reward systems. This leaves functional departments operating in relative isolation from each other, each prioritizing their own needs rather than the collective needs of the organization.
• Lack of customer focus. It can be fatal for a business when people lose sight of what really matters: the value customers are receiving. When people in organizations do not focus on, and continuously improve in this area, business outcomes will suffer. The value of the brand will be reduced, existing customers will stop buying, and new customers will be harder to acquire.
• Expecting to be “done” with the transformation. Within many organizations, people operate under the impression that transformations are one-time things. In today’s fast-paced world, that’s simply not realistic. Whether it’s a move to agile, digitization, or any other strategic transformation, initial investments and outcomes are the start, not the finish.

Enter Value Stream Management with ValueOps

Committing to continuous improvement is a fundamental change; a paradigm shift that requires an adjustment in how teams in enterprises think and deliver value. This paradigm shift can be achieved through the concept of Value Stream Management (VSM). Quite simply, value streams are the set of actions that create and deliver value to an internal or external customer. By leveraging VSM, organizations can create an environment where continuous improvement becomes the long-term norm for all employees, teams, and departments.

ValueOps by Broadcom is the catalyst for effective continuous improvement. The solution enables teams to understand their current value streams, analyze them to identify problems and opportunities, and determine the right course of action. Once these decisions are made, the platform manages the planning, prioritization, funding, and delivery of the work—capturing metrics and insights over time that can be used to both review and forecast the effect of improvements across the enterprise.

Verizon takes an iterative, ongoing approach to improvement

The company

Verizon has transformed from a phone company to a global technology leader with almost 130,000 employees. As a result, the organization had outgrown its previous processes. Teams were still operating on a series of distributed standalone systems that required people to spend time every week manually producing status reports and project communications.

The approach

The team at Verizon didn’t try to modernize and improve those legacy processes. Instead, they started to focus on the value that they create for their internal and external clients. They combined this mindset shift with an organic approach that encouraged VSM adoption at the grass roots level.

Supported by ValueOps, these early pilot engagements allowed Verizon to demonstrate success. Further, they generated the data that could be used to show leaders in other business areas what had been achieved, and what was possible with VSM. With data sourced from ValueOps, each group could see where bottlenecks were occurring and how projects could be accelerated. This data-driven approach has fostered broad acceptance. With the support of ValueOps, Verizon has been able to reimagine multiple areas of their operations, with front-line teams embracing the changes.

The benefits

The immediate benefits have been substantial. There was a $2 million cost saving in just one portfolio. But it’s much more than that. They’ve freed up staff time so they could spend more time focused on helping customers and the business.

Instead of spending time producing manual status reports and other similarly low-value tasks, teams can invest their time where it will make a difference. Further, ValueOps helps identify where those opportunities are, and enables effective and efficient improvements to be delivered, time and time again.

Conclusion

Today’s business world is moving faster than ever, and it’s only going in one direction—forwards. Leaders can either seek to stay in front of this change or get passed by the competition. With ValueOps, enterprise teams can establish the visibility they need to embrace continuous improvement, so they can stay in front of their markets and deliver maximum customer value. To learn more, be sure to review our in-depth white paper, “Drive Continuous Improvement.”