Value Streams are known as the primary SAFe construct intended for organizing, understanding and delivering value. Every value stream is considered as a long-lived series of the steps which an enterprise would use in order to offer continuous flow of value to the customer. The main goal of the SAFe portfolio would be about financing and nurturing set of solution development activities which either delivers the end user with direct value or whether to support some other business value streams. It is considered as a critical skill to identify and optimize value streams of the Lean-Agile enterprise.
It is a fact that organizing around value would offer substantial benefits into the organization such as faster learning, higher quality, solutions, higher productivity and shorter time of marketing which are all better fit into the intended purpose. SAFe would definitely be of great help for you in terms of organizing around value that would be accomplished first by understanding the value streams and finally organizing the SAFe Agile Release Trains in order to realize them. The art and science of SAFe is realizing the value streams through the ARTs. Apart from that, value streams would lend themselves into systematic analysis as well as improvement through value stream mapping that is utilised in order to identify as well as address the delays and also the non-value added activities therefore helping in terms of accomplishing only the shortest sustainable lead time.
What are the types of Value Streams?
For SAFe, system builders should be aware about the two types of the value streams that are present in a certain enterprise. The first one is the operational value streams which show the steps to be used in order to provide services and goods to the customer both for external and internal. And this is how the said company would make money. The second one is the development value streams that are to show the steps being used in order to develop new products, services capabilities and systems. In most cases, these are the same, once a solution provider would develop the product for sale as well as feeds distribution directly. However, in the said case there is only a value stream being the development as well as operations are considered to be the same. Still, it is critical to understand both types of the value streams since the development value stream would feed the operational value stream.
How to identify value streams?
Within some organizations, it is a simple task to identify value streams. Most are simply the services, products and solutions they develop as well as sell. Once the enterprise gets a bit larger the task would be more complicated as well. Value would flow via applications as well as services and might across numbers of parts of the distributed organization to numbers of external and internal customers of different types. In some of the larger IT shops, value might move across numbers of departments as well as organizations and also across numbers of deployed systems. And in that case, finding the value stream might be an essential analytical as well as business context-related activity which provides basic foundation intended for the Lean-Agile transformation.
