August 12, 2024
Author: Laureen Knudsen
In today’s business environment, the constant imperative is to move quickly, maximize efficiency, and boost value delivery. When there’s a lack of trust among teams and leaders, all those objectives can be stymied.
Trust is critical in an enterprise, so it must be cultivated across the organization. Value stream management (VSM) overcomes many of the challenges to building organizational trust. VSM represents a holistic approach that promotes visibility and alignment so teams can enjoy more trust throughout the organization and deliver more value to customers.
Overcoming Obstacles: Common Challenges to Building Trust
Within an enterprise, building trust among diverse teams can be a significant undertaking. Even after all that work, trust can evaporate. Just one broken commitment, ill-advised initiative, or instance of using analytics punitively raises doubt or erodes trust.
As the demands within business environments continue to intensify, trust represents a fundamental enabler of success. Cultivating trust remains a critical imperative for enterprise leaders. In fact, the PricewaterhouseCoopers 2024 Trust Survey found that 93% of business executives believe that building trust boosts the bottom line. According to PwC, while 86% of business leaders highly trust their employees, only 60% of employees feel highly trusted.
In working to cultivate trust, executives face key obstacles:
Lack of transparency
Teams and leaders need clear visibility into plans, work, and progress. Without this visibility, inefficiencies proliferate, and mistrust grows.
Issues with tracking progress
In large enterprises, tracking how teams are progressing in their delivery of value to customers takes massive effort. Often, teams and leaders must rely on manually updated status reports and meetings to try to gauge progress. These labor-intensive, error-prone efforts can compromise trust, leading it to spiral and take a nosedive.
Difficulty in alignment and issue resolution
Trust and transparency are vital in keeping disparate teams aligned. Team alignment is particularly problematic when it comes to business and IT teams, which have long suffered from disconnect. This lack of transparency and trust stifles collaboration and creates waste and inefficiencies.
How to Improve Organizational Trust
To improve organizational trust, companies must address key obstacles.
Transparency
Organizations can increase transparency by connecting value definition and work efforts to measure actual value creation. This goal can be achieved through accountability, feedback, and continuous improvement. Other ways to promote transparency include setting up portfolio hierarchies, developing outcome-oriented roadmaps, and building strategic objectives and key results (OKRs).
Tracking Progress
Issues with tracking progress can be resolved by providing progress visualization for different stakeholders based on common data. Progress reports should be aggregated with near real-time status. Setting up program dashboards, such as those offered by Rally, allows users to choose the performance metrics they need for tracking.
Alignment and Issue Resolution
Problems with alignment and resolution can be solved by making key insights relevant to every stakeholder. The Rally platform provides organizations with insights relevant to different stakeholders through Insights performance reports.
Value Stream Management: A Key to Fostering Organizational Trust
When it comes to cultivating trust, organizations tend to fall into one of two categories: those that lack trust and those with complete, sustained trust. The companies that have achieved organizational trust take advantage of value stream management processes.
1) Lack Trust
In this group, teams within organizations are contending with unrealistic strategies and manually maintained spreadsheets. These teams fundamentally lack trust in their data, which makes decision-making more challenging and saps overall effectiveness. Given these challenges, these organizations are more likely to fall behind in their markets.
When teams are saddled with unreliable reports and constantly shifting targets, performance suffers. Leaders can’t accurately assess the true performance of their teams or their strategic investments. Ultimately, these factors stifle execution and hinder the success of key initiatives.
2) Achieve Complete, Sustained Trust
Companies in this category equip teams with value-based plans and metrics. Unlike teams at companies that lack trust, these teams have absolute confidence in their data and can objectively track how their investments are performing. In this way, teams gain the ability to optimize value delivery and adapt more quickly.
VSM offers a digital operating model that establishes trust by helping teams create practices centered on enabling software organizations to enhance the flow of value. VSM is focused on aligning processes and teams around the preferences, requirements, and needs of customers.
Strategies for Building and Sustaining Trust in Your Organization
Data represents the foundation of decision-making. When data becomes unreliable, trust can become fragile and easily erode. To combat this erosion of trust, enterprises need to establish cohesive digital operating models, such as VSM, that are sustained by a singular, real-time data source, which represents a strong foundation for trust.
By establishing these optimized digital operating models, teams can:
- Boost visibility
- Strengthen trust
- Provide more value to customers
This model requires teams to align both business and IT teams around customer value. By focusing on shared outcomes and objectives and establishing clear metrics, leaders can position their organizations for success.
To achieve these outcomes, VSM has become a powerful framework. At its core, VSM entails analysis and optimization of the end-to-end value flow within the organization. Through VSM, organizations can better position themselves to create superior products and services.
Achieving Success Through Organizational Trust and VSM
Teams at enterprises encounter many challenges as they seek to build trust. However, teams can overcome these obstacles through value stream management.
In the pursuit of strategic digital transformation initiatives, trust represents a make-or-break factor. Today, VSM is indispensable for fostering the trust required. Through VSM, organizations can establish digital operating models that fuel seamless alignment and enhanced value delivery.
Take a deep dive into how VSM can help your organization boost trust, visibility, and value. Review our white paper Improve Organizational Trust.