Strategies for Fostering Collaboration and Alignment with VSM

In large part, an organization’s success hinges on how well its people work together. When different teams are working at cross purposes or pursuing redundant or misaligned efforts, precious resources—including time, money, and business opportunities—get wasted.

It is for these reasons that fostering collaboration across the organization is a vital strategic imperative. However, when chief transformation officers (CTOs) and other executives seek to foster effective collaboration, they typically encounter three key obstacles:

• Trouble aligning silos and orchestrating diverse teams. For years, organizations have been stifled by silos, and those challenges only get more pronounced as new ways of working—a reliance upon hybrid workers, geographically dispersed teams, a blend of in-house and contracted resources, and more—become the norm. Leaders must be able to support these models, while at the same time ensuring people are managed in a fair, consistent, and transparent manner.
• Difficulty managing and measuring work across different levels and methodologies. Effective collaboration isn’t just about ensuring that product and delivery functions work well together—it must also include financial planning, sales, marketing, talent management, support, and other adjacent roles. All these areas will inevitably have their own planning and work management methods, and these different approaches tend to create complexities when these groups need to collaborate with each other. Leaders must be able to foster collaboration, while enabling these different functions to work with the tools and methodologies that they’re most comfortable and productive with.
• Collaboration is inefficient, intermittent, and slow. In many organizations, collaboration is fundamentally about sporadic meetings and manually compiled status reports. As a result, collaboration is impeded by gaps and slowdowns. These inefficiencies stifle teams’ ability to assess and improve organizational progress. To support successful transformation, leaders must enhance feedback and performance measurement and eliminate data silos.

How Value Stream Management can help

Organizations must overcome these barriers to establish effective and efficient collaboration. In recent years, there has been a widespread move to promote effective collaboration through the adoption of value streams. These are organizational structures that encompass the entire sequence of actions and workflows needed to create and deliver value to customers.

Value Stream Management (VSM) represents the approach and technology infrastructure needed to achieve these objectives. Through VSM, organizations can be transformed, establishing a business model focused on collaboration, alignment, and continuous value improvement. In this way, VSM fosters an environment in which people find it easier to engage, working together is natural, and efficiency is optimized.

With ValueOps by Broadcom, teams can create value streams that form the catalyst for improved collaboration. ValueOps provides visibility into all the people and technology that make up each value stream. The solution enables the funding of the teams doing the work rather than simply self-contained, standalone pieces of work. This reduces friction, harmonizes teams around the common goal of improving value flow, and encourages continuous improvement of the value stream.

Tyson Foods fosters collaboration, focus on delivering value

Tyson Foods, the largest processor and marketer of chicken, beef, and pork in the US, is focused on the future. To be successful, the company’s leadership knew that they needed to break down internal silos, improve visibility, and eliminate confusion over what was being done and why.

Within Tyson, people were reorganized from disparate teams to value streams. This began with IT as a pilot program, and revealed what could be achieved across the entire organization. Decision makers chose ValueOps as the technology infrastructure for this initiative because its capabilities were highly aligned with their goals.

With new visibility into work efforts and capacity, Tyson was able to focus its new value stream on the highest ROI initiatives while eliminating wasted and redundant efforts. This reduced resourcing demands from 300% of capacity to just 100 – 120%. Once deployed, ValueOps allowed these teams to focus on what drives value, while encouraging collaboration on the development of more effective and efficient solutions.

Conclusion

By promoting collaboration, organizations realize a range of benefits. With improved collaboration, teams can be inspired by different ideas and perspectives, and create the synergy that promotes innovation and progress across the enterprise. When teams are working together to develop solutions and overcome challenges, they can achieve greater efficiency, capitalize on new market opportunities, and solve problems more effectively.

To learn more, be sure to download our white paper, Foster Collaboration. This paper explores the challenges teams confront in boosting collaboration, and it provides a detailed look at the strategies and solutions that can help in establishing an organization that embraces collaboration and delivers successful business transformation.