The Value Stream Management Market & Certifications

The Current State

This year, the Inaugural State of Value Stream Management Report 2021 provided a baseline as to where enterprise organizations stand in implementing this crucial piece of visibility for DevOps. It shows that while the market is at the early stages of VSM adoption, teams are working aggressively to implement and leverage VSM for competitive growth and positioning.

The full report is worth the read for enterprise leaders and anyone involved in the creation of products and services. Packed with useful data, readers can see which flow metrics successful teams focus on, how businesses align their teams and organize around the digital value stream, discoveries being made with value stream mapping, and how to progress in the adoption of DevOps practices. Our own Head of Product for DevOps at HCLSoftware, Brian Muskoff was a proud contributor to this report and HCLSoftware is one of the five founding members of the VSMC.

Certifications for Value Stream Management

Building on the great insights that came from this report, the VSMC has also developed the Value Stream Management Foundation certification through DevOps Institute. The comprehensive course is an introduction to value stream management principles, practice, and tools. It’s designed to optimize value flow and realization in digital value streams and develop skills for this emerging field. Digital value streams include the software applications and services in addition to the platforms that support them like cloud infrastructure or DevOps toolchains.

According to Gartner by 2023, 70% of organizations will use value stream management to improve flow in the DevOps pipeline, leading to faster delivery of customer value. With this aggressive market adoption of VSM in mind, leaders and developers can better position themselves for success by understanding the history and evolution of VSM, how to identify value streams, mapping value streams, connecting DevOps toolchains, value stream metrics. Getting certified in Value Stream Management provides a foundation to expand the practice and is free to all VSMC members or can be taken through DevOps Institute.

Why It Matters 

Efficient and value-driven software delivery is a major component of the successful enterprise digital transformation journey. Consequently, the most elusive part of digital transformation is measuring it. This is the part where value stream management becomes critical. It is the emerging practice in software delivery that takes aim at defining and measuring successful DevOps practices and digital transformation efforts.

Before value stream management, software delivery was like taking a long road trip across the country without a GPS. Drivers know the direction and destination they are going, but are probably not taking the quickest route. They may encounter delays, get lost a few times, and spend much more time and money to get to where they are going. For an enterprise, this lack of efficiency and visibility can amount to millions of dollars and the dreaded spinning of wheels on the digital transformation journey.

HCL Accelerate is the industry-leading data-driven value stream management platform that is guiding faster software delivery and enabling more efficient digital transformations with automated governance and metric visibility.