Targetprocess Named a Strong Performer as a Value Stream Management Tool

You can’t attend an Agile conference or chat with a Product Owner about product launches without hearing about the importance of end-user value. And in the world of software delivery, if you don’t deliver features and functionality that your customers find useful — your development team may soon be out of a job.

We’re excited to announce that Targetprocess was named a “Strong Performer” as a value stream management (VSM) tool in The Forrester New Wave™: Value Stream Management Tools, Q3 2018, published August 6.

Forrester noted us for “providing highly flexible and configurable dashboards that allow users to create integrated experiences, as well as a very flexible process-mapping capability…”

Our software supports program and portfolio level process standardization while at the same time allowing team-level processes, views and dashboards to be configured independently. And, it is certified easy to use.

What is Value Stream Management?

What steps are you taking to provide value to your customer? That’s the main question behind value stream management.

“A value stream is a long-lived series of steps used to deliver value, from concept or customer order to delivery of a tangible result for the customer,” according to © Scaled Agile, Inc.

A value stream includes the people working on your project, the systems they operate, and the flow of information and materials between teams. For a value stream to truly payoff for the customer, internal or external, you as an Agile leader must coordinate all efforts — from business objectives and customer requests to program and portfolio management to development and testing to DevOps.

With a focus on delivering impactful value to your customer, all of your processes are directed toward a single goal. Through proper definition and mapping of the value stream, you provide your team with a clear grasp on the entire flow, not just a myopic view of their contribution. This brings improved collaboration and increased communication to a project and allows teams to succeed together. With the help of a flexible platform, like Targetprocess, you can visualize each step, making it easy to see where quality can be improved, delays eliminated, and costs reduced.

Value stream management helps you plan, track, and steer work at the team, program, portfolio, and enterprise levels. By coordinating this work, you deliver benefit to the end user faster and ensure that all efforts in a single value stream are coordinated with enterprise objectives. Access to clear, easy to interpret data, supports this coordination by visually highlighting inbound and outbound dependencies and blockers across all teams, helping you focus on reducing lead time and accelerating time-to-market.

When analyzing your value stream, your organization needs to hone in on the metrics you will use to measure value delivery and have systems in place to automatically capture these metrics and report on them in real-time. Common KPIs such as cycle time, mean time to repair (MTTR), lead-time, and process-time must be defined and measured. Reports displaying the KPIs you decide to focus on should be available at the team, program, or portfolio level, and they should be easy for your team members to access and understand. Visualizing these metrics allows you to see where bottlenecks exist, where waste is occurring, and help you determine where to optimize.

The Targetprocess Approach

“I believe that our inclusion in the Forrester New Wave on VSM validates our strength in business agility and scaled agile through our focus on visualization,” said Andrey Mihailenko, co-founder of Targetprocess.

Targetprocess has more than a decade of experience powering Agile team and enterprise transformations with a flexible, visual, and customizable platform that unifies both IT and non-IT teams. In alignment with value stream management, Targetprocess provides the visual transparency and analytics needed to continually improve your Agile process and accelerate value delivery to your customers. It’s why we were named a Visionary on Gartner's 2018 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Agile Planning Tools.

Ready to see how you can align business goals with technical execution? Looking for a way to coordinate activities across multiple projects and teams to deliver more value to your end-user? Check out how Targetprocess can help and sign up for a free trial, or send us an email. We’d be happy to set up a time to discuss your unique situation.