Chapter 1: Delivering Customer-Centric Value

This chapter introduces the many different definitions of value and explains how Agile, Systems Thinking, and Lean Development work together to deliver customer-centric value. With this base of understanding, Value Stream Management (VSM) and DevOps(development-operations) are also introduced as complementary Information Technology (IT) practices and tools to support Lean-Agile practices.

You will learn how VSM helps maximize the flow of customer value across an organization's software development and delivery processes. For example, VSM helps improve the flow of work across systems development life cycle (SDLC) processes when developing applications supporting business operations.

However, VSM cannot be just about improving software development and delivery practices for business systems in a digital economy. Many commercial businesses, government agencies, and nonprofits offer information-oriented products and services delivered as web-based services. Additionally, many physical products incorporate computing devices, software, and internet access to deliver new features and enhanced functionality on demand and throughout their life cycles.

For these reasons, the use of VSM methods and tools must go beyond IT to help improve workflows and information flow across operations and development-oriented value streams.

DevOps improves communications across IT departments in a complementary fashion, while integrating and automating IT processes to enable a continuous flow of customer-centric value across all organizational value streams. As a result, a modern DevOps team can deliver value orders of magnitude more efficiently, rapidly, and error-free than with traditional SDLC and Agile practices.

In this chapter, you will learn how these practices work in concert to deliver customer-centric value. The topics covered include the following:

• Defining the term value in its many forms
• Developing a value proposition
• Creating value
• Taking a Lean-Agile view of value
• Understanding VSM
• Understanding the role of DevOps in delivering value
• Integrating Lean, Agile, VSM, and DevOps

Defining the term value in its many forms

This book is fundamentally about creating digital transformations to deliver customer-centric value efficiently, rapidly, and at a lower cost. Such a strategy involves including and aligning IT with the value stream transformations occurring across the enterprise. VSM is a Lean production improvement strategy that's found new applications in IT. Since VSM is the primary focus of this book, let's start with definitions of value in a VSM context.