[Music] we're back with Enterprise JY podcast I'm John Lim and today we've got a pair of Grumpy Old Men returning to talk value streams for a Champlain and any Jordan are back with us to break down what value stream is and of course what it isn't Andy so Fred I am well aware that I'm a grumpy old man but you're a grumpy middle-aged man so we probably get on well everybody talks to me about value streams but they seem to think that this value stream is another it construct and it's all about development and Technical operations and once you get to the end of your development value stream well everything's done and it's all good and we'll just go and do something else and to me that kind of sort of misses the point of where the whole value stream process started with business architecture and Enterprise architecture and all that good stuff that actually defines you know value for the business your thoughts Andy first of all it's a delight to be here again with you so um yeah would love to share uh more about that I I think that uh today when we think about value streams many people think about um what what can be referred to as development value streams or you know maybe supporting or enabling value streams there's various uh terms for that and you're right uh frequently equated to roughly to a Dev Ops pipeline uh and and that's is certainly part of value stream architecture so when we think about value stream architecture though we also think about you know the actual business operations or or you know business value streams again a couple ways to refer to to those but it's really the development value streams are supporting the value stages or the capability and the capabilities that that support uh business value streams because after all our customer is experiencing their Journey uh our business or operational uh value streams so that's what they're experiencing through the touch points of our applications um maybe through apis on a mobile app and it's really the those development value streams that are making all of that possible but at the end of the day the business is running uh it's it's running along the lines of of the business operational value streams that's where the values actually being delivered whether it's a product or a service and I think that's something that organiz ations fundamentally understand if you step away from that value stream world that you know there's been a lot of talk in recent years about it and the business coming together and partnering and and recognizing how to deliver the best possible solutions for the organization but somehow when we start talking about value streams we kind of lose that we back to that differentiation between business operations and development and Technical operations and and we kind of lose that sort sort of inherent single flow for the business that's right uh and really bringing these together is quite critical uh because of course we want to make decisions based on on what's best for the business from a business perspective um in delivery of value so we want to optimize the flow of value across our our our operational value streams our business operational value streams uh and of course operational uh in in in development as well we want to optimize the flow of those improvements of those changes of those new uh capabilities and features for example if you're thinking about products um of course we want to look at flow in in all of our value streams so pulling that together cohesively in into a a business architecture model and being able to model scenarios uh maybe changes due to m&a or maybe competitive pressure to optimize a particular value stage uh a particular customer Journey experience uh then we understand where to invest and that governance might look like I think it's so important I mean I've spent a lot of my career in the project World talking to organizations about ensuring that project teams and project managers whether it's traditional or agile or hybrid or whatever understand not just what they have to deliver but why that has to be delivered how it benefits the organization how it helps the organization and this idea of value streams it brings that down to the fundamental level it doesn't matter who you are what role you have where you work in the organization where you're distributed across the planet if you're working towards an environment that is designed to optimize a value stream you understand the purpose of your work you understand your contribution it's such a fundamentally new and not new anymore but fundamentally different way of thinking of things that that makes life so much easier in the the relative complexity of today's world yeah that's right Andy there's by going through the exercise of identifying and maintaining uh and understanding your value streams brings tremendous amount of clarity it can be uh challenging to do uh but that's why we have value stream mapping and the in and that process uh to do that Discovery but almost always there's there's something discovered even in companies are are maintaining their business architecture maintaining their value stream architecture there's always something new to find there and and uh those discoveries can be exciting they can also be challenging uh because there may be imp implications in terms of organization and funding and governance as well U typically maybe finding bottlenecks or um sometimes there's friction that needs to be addressed as well excellent and the checks in the mail Fred because you did a great job there of uh of promoting our next conversation the next podcast um where we're going to talk in more detail about that idea of mapping and Discovery and and start giving you The Listener some idea of how you can go about mapping and and understanding your own value stream so that you can then you know evolve the way that your organization is managed along those lines so please join us again then and Fred for now thank you so much for joining us thanks again Andy [Music]