October 9, 2024
Author: Marla Schimke
Delivering great products that create exceptional customer experiences is crucial for business success and growth. Value stream management (VSM) is the key to empowering your company to focus on customer value and has the capabilities to help enterprises provide that value. With VSM, your organization maximizes value delivery by increasing efficiency, data visibility, and customer satisfaction.
While VSM has many significant benefits, companies often face pitfalls on the road to VSM adoption and maturity. These challenges prevent organizations from progressing in their VSM journey and seeing results, such as faster delivery of higher-quality products.
Here’s an overview of 4 common value stream management challenges that companies face during VSM adoption and practice, along with insights on how to overcome these obstacles.
Challenge 1: Resistance to Change
Like most business strategies, VSM needs to become part of the company culture for adoption to succeed. Organizations may resist VSM due to ingrained traditional practices or fear of restructuring. Unless the goals of the entire organization are aligned with value delivery, a company will fail to establish a successful VSM strategy. Instead of seeing VSM as an enabler, teams may mischaracterize the strategy as just another initiative.
The solution for this problem is to foster a culture of continuous improvement by demonstrating VSM's benefits through pilot programs and leadership buy-in. For example, when Tyson Foods began using Broadcom ValueOps, the executive leadership made a commitment to eliminating department silos and worked to help teams understand the value of making data-driven decisions.
Challenge 2: Lack of Cross-Departmental Collaboration
When informational silos exist between departments, companies limit data visibility and coordination across the business, slowing down the flow of value streams. Teams often waste time and effort gathering data from disparate resources only to end up looking at different data sets that may reflect outdated findings. Companies may lack a holistic view of the teams that are needed to deliver value, paying too much attention to product and development teams and overlooking the teams that work upstream and downstream from them.
Companies need to encourage cross-functional collaboration through shared objectives, real-time transparency, and the use of integrated tools, such as VSM platforms. Companies that adopt integrated VSM platforms experience tighter alignment and faster product delivery. When data is generated as a natural output of ongoing work and visualized on shared dashboards, everyone can work from current data as a single source of truth that gets all VSM participants and stakeholders on the same page.
Challenge 3: Poor Data Visibility and Tracking
Siloed or incomplete data can keep companies from reaching the value stream insights they need to make informed decisions. When organizations lack visibility into data and a means for tracking value streams, they can’t identify inefficiencies or understand how steps in a process are delivering value. Without the ability to visualize data and identify key metrics, companies can’t make continuous improvements in production processes. Using multiple tools for VSM that aren’t integrated can stand in the way of data visibility.
To help improve data visibility, companies can leverage individual VSM tools, which offer real-time visibility into value streams, making bottlenecks and non-value-added steps easy to spot and eliminate. Organizations can use VSM platforms, such as ValueOps by Broadcom, to continuously track key metrics, such as cycle time and throughput, which help identify bottlenecks and refine processes. Value stream mapping is the key to visualizing data so that process improvements can be made.
Challenge 4: Misalignment of Goals
When objectives differ between teams, VSM efforts often falter. Every department needs to understand how its activities relate to delivering value. If key performance indicators (KPIs) and VSM strategies fail to align with overall business outcomes, teams become fragmented and fail to see the big picture. Without alignment between goals, teams may focus on single business processes instead of seeing value streams as an end-to-end process flow from product ideation to value delivery.
Companies can ensure alignment by linking VSM goals with business outcomes, reinforcing transparency and accountability through real-time metrics dashboards. Modern VSM platforms automatically align tasks with business objectives, improving efficiency and accountability across the company. Departments across the business should prioritize customer value to ensure they’re investing in the right activities. All employees should connect value to execution to ensure they’re developing the right products and services.
Practical Tips for Avoiding VSM Obstacles
Adopting a value stream management strategy and making it work is a journey. Following some practical tips for overcoming VSM challenges will help your company make steady progress.
Try hosting regular training sessions to ensure team-wide understanding of VSM and nurture a company culture that promotes value delivery. Start with small, incremental changes before scaling full VSM adoption. Utilize continuous feedback loops that enable your organization to adapt and improve based on real-time data and metrics.
To help you find the right tools for avoiding obstacles to VSM success, we encourage you to check out our website where you will find all the information and guidance your organization needs.
About ValueOps by Broadcom
ValueOps® by Broadcom is the industry’s most complete Value Stream Management (VSM) solution. Combining robust business planning, agile delivery management, and value stream integration in one solution, ValueOps uniquely accelerates digital transformation by improving visibility, alignment, and efficiency at every stage of value creation.
With ValueOps, the seamless convergence of Clarity™, Rally®, ValueOps ConnectALL®, and ValueOps Insights in one solution empowers leaders at every level to plan, fund, manage, track, and optimize their work efforts using a common data model and value orientation. With the widest range of VSM features in the category, ValueOps has capabilities and insights to meet the needs of everyone in a value stream – effortlessly synchronizing them to align strategy, investments, people, and work across the enterprise.
About Broadcom
Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ: AVGO) is a global technology leader that designs, develops, and supplies a broad range of semiconductor and infrastructure software solutions. Broadcom’s category-leading product portfolio serves critical markets, including data center, networking, enterprise software, broadband, wireless, storage, and industrial. Our solutions include data center networking and storage, enterprise, mainframe, and cybersecurity software focused on automation, monitoring and security, smartphone components, telecoms, and factory automation. For more information, go to www.broadcom.com.
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Learn how to find the right tools for overcoming VSM obstacles by reading the 2024 Buyer's Guide for Value Stream Management. Access your copy here.