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Value Stream Assessments

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Value Stream Assessments

When working with GitLab, many prospects and customers have software delivery performance improvement as a critical business outcome. Unfortunately, due to the inherent and increasing complexity in the software delivery process, an organization's software delivery value stream often consists of dozens, if not hundreds, of manual configuration touch points and handoffs. Usually, there is a lack of understanding and visibility into the current process, making it challenging to identify and measure software delivery improvements. Without understanding the current software development value stream, organizations risk slower progress in improving their software delivery performance.

Where applicable, GitLab account teams should assist prospects and customers by providing an assessment of their value stream. The content on this page outlines the approaches, tools, and artifacts used to conduct a value stream assessment for our prospects and customers. By creating a better understanding of the current process by identifying bottlenecks and establishing a baseline measurement of software delivery performance, GitLab can ensure our prospects and customers can realize improvements more quickly and continuously.

Process

  1. Qualify the Opportunity for a value stream assessment
  2. Educate potential participants and obtain commitment to the workshop
  3. Prepare for the Value Stream Workshop
  4. Initial customer pitch
  5. Plan the Value Stream Workshop
  6. Facilitate the Value Stream Workshop
  7. Executive Briefing - Summarize the findings
  8. Contribute back to this framework

Qualify

Value stream assessments require a non-trivial investment of time by both the GitLab field teams and our prospects and customers. To ensure the appropriate return on this investment of time, the opportunities should meet the following criteria, and if not, please give any justification for why an exception should be made:

Key indicators that the opportunity is well-suited include:

The scope of a value stream assessment should always be clearly defined. A clearly defined scope ensures that the correct people are being included in the team and reduces the risk of time lost agreeing what should be focussed on. For this reason, the scope of a GitLab facilitated assessment must always be within the DevSecOps space.

Education and Commitment

A successful Value Stream Assessment requires a commitment to the workshop by the software delivery stakeholders and the personnel experienced with the various processes that constitute their value stream. Without understanding the assessment process and its value to their organization, key participants will lack the commitment to ensure a successful value stream assessment. Educate the prospect or customer on the benefits, process details, and the required commitment. Leverage the Value Stream Assessment Pitch Deck - (Recording) by customizing it for the prospect or customer to assist with this step.

While a Value Stream Assessment is an advanced discovery workshop, it's expected that initial opportunity discovery and technical discovery have been conducted.

Key Benefits

After the prospect or customer understands the process and its benefits, confirm commitment from the stakeholders and workshop participants by scheduling the facilitated workshop and/or interviews. Estimate the duration of the assessment and set the expectation that the documented value stream, recommendations, and readout will be delivered.

What is The Required Time Commitment?

Focusing on the goals and benefits listed above, the time required to complete a minimally viable value stream assessment will vary from organization to organization. The workshop should NOT require exhaustive discussion and research. Depending on the availability and commitment of the various value stream participants and stakeholders, the practice could take as little as 4 hours to complete or up to 15 hours spread out through multiple sessions over multiple days.

Prepare

Value Stream Assessment Tracking Issue

The very first step when considering a Value Stream Assessment is to notify the Value Stream Assessment team of the intent, and provide as much information as possible regarding the prospect/customer. To do so:

This gives the team at GitLab the ability to both track the progress of the Value Stream Assessment and allocate team members to the effort, a key requirement for the next preparation steps.

Internal Preparation Meeting

It is extremely important to have an internal preparation meeting (can be async) prior to pitching a Value Stream Assessment to the customer. The goal of the meeting is to be able to discuss:

Pitch

The initial customer pitch allows us to pitch value stream assesment to our key stakeholders & get their buy in. The customer pitch should include:

It is important to identify a project or few projects as next step for the planning meeting with customer.

Here are some resources that can be used as starting point for the pitch:

Planning meeting with customer

Planning a Value Stream Workshop can generally be done within an hour, given the right expectation, focus and people involved.

It is recommended that when planning a Value Stream Workshop, a Value Stream Transformation Charter should be used.

Define Value Stream

Without the answers to these questions we risk spending significant time and energy trying to understand each possible variation and often will end up with metrics that are hard to define (the "it depends" trap). As such, it's critically important that these definitions are confirmed and agreed upon prior to the workshop (generally as part of the planning meeting).

Value Stream Workshop

People

Role Responsibilities GitLab Roles
Scribe(s) A team member who's primary purpose is to document the session, capture key metrics as they emerge which will later be used to create a executive briefing template. AE, Shadow SA, CSM
Facilitator A team member fully versed in the Value Stream Mapping process who is responsible for leading the session; ensuring that discussion is staying on-topic, at the right level and at the required pace. SA
Account Leader Ensure that the long term strategic vision for the prospect is considered when discussing desired future state and they can also provide additional context to the current state. Schedule meetings with the Value Stream Assessment participants. Send summary followup emails after each session (template)Update VSA Tracking fields in Salesforce. AE

Process

The process which we will go through, at a high level, is as follows (per functional persona/team, in a single workshop or across a few meetings):

  1. Why we are here? (Exec sponsor led)
  2. Re-iterate expectations set in the planning meeting
    1. Start and end points for the value stream
  3. Current state
    1. Initial process "walk-through" / information discovery
      1. Capture people, processes and technology per persona/team (information disovery guide)
    2. 2nd process "walk-through" (if needed)
  4. Design future state (when doing a single workshop with all personas or in the planning meeting with your sponsor)
    1. Review the expectations again, to align the team on the target they are aiming to create
    2. Determine "right work" (which processes and steps are required for the value stream to be optimal)
      1. Remove processes and process steps when they are truely unnecessary
      2. Add processes and process steps when they can increase overall process time and lead time
    3. Making work flow
      1. Aim to reduce the lead time (LT), process time (PT) and achieve a higer percent complete and accurate (%C&A) for every process block where prossible
      2. Use Lean countermeasures and improvement tools
    4. Managing the work
      1. How will we measure if the value stream is performing as we intended? (KPIs)
      2. Who will monitor and manage the value stream performance?

Tools

Example Workflows

  1. Idea to Production
  2. Response to Production Incident
  3. Toolchain Upgrading and Maintenance
Idea to Production

Idea to Production

Response to Production Incident

Response to Production Incident

Toolchain Upgrading and Maintenance

Toolchain Upgrading and Maintenance

Executive Briefing - Summarize the Findings

The final meeting as part of the Value Stream Assessment process is the findings and next steps presentation (though it's called an executive presentation, it's expected to be a two-way discussion). The high level topics of this meeting are:

  1. Summary of planning outcomes; what process was to be mapped and what target goals were created
  2. Summary of the current state mapping (with VSM diagram)
  3. Summary of the proposed future state mapping (with VSM diagram)
  4. Highlight the key differences, expected process and business benefits
  5. Walkthrough of recommendations
  6. Walkthrough and gain agreement for the transformation plan. The transformation plan should be built in conjunction with professional services to yield best results. Please read how to position professional services in an opportunity here
  7. Define next steps and suggest a review date

Example template of the executive briefing can be found here. Please modify accordingly to suit your customer's need.

It is recommended to review the executive briefing with your champion, key stakeholder before the final meeting to collect additional feedback. The goal is to then deliver it jointly to the broader team to gain agreement.

FAQs from customers/prospects

  1. What's in it for me - the customer?

    • Free, hands-on consultative analysis of their software delivery lifecycle, including their current state, future state, and areas of improvements.
    • Competitive analysis of where they are compared to their peers in the industry. This report contains the most recent benchmark values for the four DORA metrics (widely regarded as good measures of DevOps performance) State of Devops Report 2021.
    • Recommendations on how to overcome visible or invisible challenges with a strategic plan to help them reach their future state.

  2. What are typical outcomes for a customer?

    • For one medical device company in Silicon Valley, doing a Value Stream Assessment provided them with a tangible adoption plan to decrease their release cycle from 6 months to 1 months. It was specific, actionable, and realistic.

    • For a financial service bank, doing a Value Stream Assessment provided them with a comparison of their process with their peers, and the clear path forward to improve their processes, and ultimately allowed them to achieve a desired ROI of releasing software faster while increasing quality.

    • Financial Services customers have realized the below outcomes when coupling a Value Stream Assessment with GitLab investment:
      • Faster time to market
      • Increase deployment frequency
      • Reduced lead time to change
      • Improved change failure rate
      • Necessary capabilities obtained to drive transformation change (e.g., digital, devOps, software delivery, modern applications)

  3. Which teams are typically involved?

    • We start with application development team, quality engineering team, devops then application security.

  4. What's the best place to start?

    • Pick the most business critical application or a representative application that has faster time to market requirement.

  5. That's a lot of time investment from our teams Or Our teams are busy with other projects.

    • It takes 1 or 1.5 hr per team to do focused discovery for a Value Stream Assessment. We interviewed 4 different teams for our silicon valley customer in 4.5 hrs. We can start with the least busy team if you don't want it to be pursued in a group setting.

  6. Can you interview 1 team at a time?

    • Yes. We would like to start with application development team if so. This helps us understand an overview of their development process(idea-production) process.

Salesforce Tracking

Three minute video overview covering the fields and process described below.

The Account Leader (AE) is responsible for maintaining the Salesforce opportunity level VSA Tracking Fields outline below:

Solutions Architects should leverage the following SA Actiity Types when loggin activity

Training and Enablement

The single source of truth for training and VSA artifacts can be found on the associated HighSpot page.

Value Stream Assessment Overview

This course is designed to provide an overview of how GitLab account teams should assist prospects and customers by providing a lightweight assessment of their value stream. The course outlines the approaches, tools, and artifacts used to conduct a value stream assessment for our prospects and customers.

Past Enablement

How to Contribute

In the spirit of collaboration and iteration, please help to continuously improve this framework. Ways to contribute include:

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