How Tech Leaders Can Avoid the Black Box Trap With Value Stream Management

Recently, we published a post for finance leaders on how to break open the black box that is software development. Now, I’d like to share some guidance for their technology counterparts on how to avoid being perceived as a black box in the first place.

First, let’s review the issue at hand from the perspective of technology leaders. Software development has, over the past decade or more, become the fastest-growing and largest expense line item in virtually every industry. The professional management of software development is a relatively new field, continuously evolving as software development itself has continuously evolved. Many technology leaders began as developers and have grown into leadership roles as they’ve progressed in their careers.

Part of the issue is that the way software developers have been taught to measure their own productivity does not align with the way the business measures the value of their work. Agile/DevOps metrics are aimed to optimize how efficiently a development team operates, but don’t necessarily speak to whether the outputs are aligned with the business’ strategic goals. And while such operational and activity metrics measure defined development deliverables, they fail to take into account the time spent on the front-end or back-end of the software development lifecycle, such as business approvals, testing, release etc, which are often where the most time is spent in the software development lifecycle 

Read the full article here on VSM Times.

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