What is a value stream?

- [Narrator] Before we can explore value stream management we need to understand what a value stream is. Value streams are the systems of work that we use to create value. A value stream is all the actions we take to provide value to a customer. We start from the customer request and the value stream provides an abstraction of the system of work showing the stages work goes through until the value it provides to the customer. If a value stream represents the system of work that generates value for a customer what is customer value? Well, value can be difficult to define what one customer sees is valuable another may not. Yet we talk about value streams we are focusing on the delivery of that value to the customer. The methods described here relate to the practices of agile DevOps and value stream management all of which are customer centric looking at value from a customer's perspective. It is worth keeping in mind that different parts of your organization may perceive value in different ways. Detailed approaches to techniques for defining customer value for example the Kano model, or human-centric design are outside the scope of this course, but we will touch on them as necessary. As mentioned value streams have their roots in lean manufacturing and the Toyota production system. They're a useful model when seeking to understand how value is delivered in your organization. The first widely accepted use of lean principles to software development was in Mary and Tom Pupendyke's 2003 book "Lean Software Development." This fed into the agile movement and eventually the DevOps movement. With the success of agile and DevOps helping us understand the differences for organizations in the digital economy sees software eating the world a desire to scale agile came about and along with it a renewed interest in flow. While DevOps looked to solve the software delivery problem and introduce flow, it rarely achieved its goal of end-to-end optimization, so now we see a rise in business agility and the topic of this course value stream management. Throughout this course, we'll be drawing on lean and agile principles to describe value streams. Of course, value streams are everywhere. Let's use an example of going to a coffee shop. The sequence of events from you requesting a coffee to it being prepared to it being delivered to you is a value stream and value streams can be mapped, and the map will exit with the main activities, and explain the value of the work. Value streams are a time diagnostic of the system of work. What does this mean? It means they have form us about the flow of work in the system, and where opportunities might exist to improve. When we draw a value stream out like this we refer to it as value stream map, which unfortunately shares the same acronym as value stream management. To make the mapping exercise valuable we measure the time in process and the time out of process. The co-creation of value stream map is a powerful exercise, we'll cover more in this course. To paraphrase Eisenhower the map is useless mapping is everything. When using value streams with DevOps, we are often looking at the system delivery process from ideation to operating the final system. Visualizing the flow of working, or delivery systems using value stream maps so we can manage the ongoing improvement is the purpose of value stream management. We can also consider value streams have other aspects. Value streams can be measured and exist at different levels of your organization. Value streams can be nested, and value streams might be supported by one or more products. Now, we've covered what a value stream is, consider what value streams you see around you. What is the value stream being generated, and how might you go about measuring them?