Integrating Lean, Agile, VSM, and DevOps

So far, you have learned that Agile's values and principles, Lean production practices, and the collaboration, integration, and automation capabilities of VSM and DevOps all support an organization's primary objective: to deliver customer-centric value. As a Lean-Agile practitioner, your job is to help blend these concepts and capabilities into a seamless way of working.

Industry research confirms that Agile and Lean-Agile practices are now mainstream. For example, Digital.ai's 14th Annual State of Agile report (2020) found that 75% of their IT respondents are practicing Scrum or a hybrid of Scrum as their preferred Agile-based framework and that 35% of the respondents use the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) as their scaling Lean-Agile based framework of choice. Those numbers are 5% up from the previous year.

In the meantime, the installation of DevOps capabilities is increasingly viewed as table stakes to participate in our global digital economy. The high performers' metrics demonstrate that those organizations that effectively master DevOps have a significant competitive advantage over those that do not.

In contrast, VSM is still an emergent practice that is quickly evolving and gaining acceptance across the IT industry. However, given the large-scale success of Lean production concepts across the manufacturing and service industries, the fundamental lean concepts behind VSM bolsters the point of view that suggests continued adoption and success in the IT industry. This prediction stands because IT value streams must align with and support the broader Lean enterprise's value streams.

In her blog titled How to Use Value Stream Mapping in DevOps at https://www.lucidchart.com/blog/, Lizz Corrigan makes the following observation:

"In a DevOps environment, VSM and lean methodologies are tailored to specific actions, such as moving work between teams to creating tangible deliverables and incident reports. DevOps VSM is a uniting visual representation of how IT and businesses build, deploy, and manage workflows. It should begin with the SDLC and move through quality assurance and release/operations."

In short, VSM provides the infrastructure to guide and monitor new requirements through the DevOps pipeline. By the end of this book, you should have a solid understanding of how to link these capabilities to marshal and accelerate value-oriented work across IT development and operations functions.