Value Stream Mapping (VSM) Led Approach for Waste and Time to Market Reduction in Software Product Development Process

Digital transformation involving business model, products and business process innovation is the hottest buzzword in the industry today. Digital transformation in Telecom Service Providers (Telco) needing quicker software product and services development and delivery is heavily leveraging the Agile DevOps techniques. So far, the attempts at expediting product rollout have been only partly successful in realizing their stated objectives of faster time to market, and maximizing return on investments (ROI) for product and services innovation investments. Among the challenges, lack of end to end value stream visualization, siloed tools with different data sources to lacking right measures, governance resulting are the key ones resulting in longer & unpredictable time to value. The challenges can be remediated by leveraging Value Stream Management (VSM) approach being widely used in the manufacturing industry. In this paper we present value stream management (VSM) led approach to remediate agile DevOps implementations as well as to better digital transformation ROI. This approach hinges on the key improvement strategies vis-à-vis traditional in respect of a) creating end to end value chain visibility facilitating value chain monitoring and tracking b) developing a normalized common data model across disparate value chain components c) integrating product engineering tools across the value chain d) eliminating non value adds (NVAs) from the value chain. The approach has been illustrated by taking an example of VSM led DevOps implementation in a telco covering the methodology in detail, leading to the improvements in key KPIs.