July 29, 2024

Author: Lance Knight

How Integrating VSM and Metrics Boosts Team and Organization Performance 

Teams, whether in sports or the IT realm, consist of individuals with distinct roles and objectives. Recognizing and valuing these different roles forms the bedrock of successful collaboration. Only through this collaboration can the larger organization ultimately be successful. 

The foundation for improving the performance of your team and your organization is built by understanding the metrics that shape not only your role but also those of your colleagues across departments. Metrics are measurable ways to understand the goals teams set and how they achieve them. 

Integrating value stream management (VSM) with metrics helps teams address challenges, such as misaligned priorities and inefficient product delivery. The purpose of VSM is to increase operational efficiency to enhance customer experience and value.  

Success can be achieved when VSM is integrated with metrics that present a complete picture of the organization. 

Taking a Holistic Approach to Metrics 

While focusing on your own critical metrics might be ingrained in you due to performance evaluations or incentives, it's equally important to understand how your peers' success is measured.  

Are your goals aligned or in competition? 

Considering whether team metrics are aligned is often overlooked as you focus on your daily responsibilities. However, team metrics hold immense significance. The intricately intertwined nature of jobs means that your achievements rely on others, just as others rely on your contributions. 

Tracking key data in a holistic way is necessary. Taking a holistic approach to metrics means incorporating all the metrics crucial for assessing product delivery initiatives and making informed decisions regarding future performance and value, including metrics that are pertinent to your colleagues in production and DevOps teams. 

Understanding the Key Metrics that Drive Team Success 

While your concerns might revolve around Agile principles, your peers in production or DevOps teams are likely to focus on different metrics. Here’s a breakdown of how areas of focus for metrics can vary among each team: 

Agile Team Focus 

• Ensuring the team has adequate resources for efficient work 

• Meeting release commitments 

• Managing work in progress (WIP) 

• Identifying and resolving process issues 

• Evaluating code testability, flexibility, and maintainability 

• Addressing technical debt 

 Production Team Focus 

• Resolving defects quickly 

• Maintaining stable throughput or velocity 

• Managing maintenance budget effectively 

• Controlling scope 

• Staying on-track for delivery of the next release 

DevOps Focus 

• Meeting uptime expectations 

• Ensuring consistent delivery of functional, tested, and fixed code 

• Adhering to SLAs 

• Releasing minimum viable products (MVPs) 

• Ensuring swift recovery 

Overcoming Challenges by Integrating Metrics 

Despite the differences, agile, production, and DevOps teams share similar challenges, demanding a cohesive framework of interlinked metrics. Addressing one challenge offers insights into the others, while actions affecting one metric can ripple across others. 

Navigating this intricate web of metrics and maintaining a holistic view of your value stream's health begins with establishing common ground. Each group boasts metrics pivotal to their performance, encompassing factors such as: 

• Throughput Variation 

• Distribution 

• Bug Aging 

• Mean Time to Recover (MTTR) 

• Escaped Defects 

• Bottlenecks 

Achieving Excellence through VSM and Metrics 

A deeper understanding of how your colleagues prioritize metrics accelerates collaboration, minimizes friction, and bolsters predictability, a collective aspiration. VSM solutions provide the means to orchestrate this metrics integration, allowing you to promote synergy, efficiency, and ultimate success across your organization. 

 VSM platforms can harness the potential of metrics across teams. With VSM platforms, business leaders can assign target value metrics to value streams. For example, VSM platforms can help DevOps teams prioritize work based on value and measure the value delivered. 

 ValueOps by Broadcom, a leading platform in the VSM space, helps teams focus on value delivery by analyzing end-to-end value streams to improve overall efficiency. ValueOps supports various methodologies, including Agile, Lean, and DevOps, making it a versatile platform for organizations pursuing continuous improvement. 

Learn more about our VSM platform and how it can provide the critical metrics integration your teams need. Be sure to contact the Broadcom ValueOps team today.