Manifesting Business Agility

First, let’s get clear on what a value stream is. It is the set of actions that take place to add value to a customer from the initial request through realization of value by the customer. The value stream begins with the initial concept, moves through various stages for one or more development teams (where Agile methods begin), and on through final delivery and support.

This definition is decades old and has unfortunately been redefined by Scale Agile Inc. Doing so has weakened its value. To be clear, a value stream is what is. It can be mapped but it can’t be defined. Value streams are affected by several factors. The most critical ones of these are:

• What’s going into the value stream (smaller is better)
• Visibility of the work (visible is critical)
• How people are doing their work and whether they have explicit agreements about how they are doing it (test-first, limited handoffs, explicit workflow)
• How many value streams people are in (1 is ideal)
• How people are organized to work on things (same type of work comes to same people)

Improving your value streams means to improve these factors that affect it. The reason product thinking is so important is that it makes it much easier to improve all of these factors.