DevOps Institute: Value Stream Management (VSM) Foundation

Course Overview

The Value Stream Management Foundation course from Value Stream Management Consortium, and offered in partnership with DevOps Institute, is an introductory course taking learners through a value stream management implementation journey. It considers the human, process, and technology aspects of this way of working and explores how optimizing value streams for flow and realization positively impacts organizational performance.

Target Audience

People working in an organization aiming to improve performance, especially in response to digital transformation or disruption. Any roles involved in the creation and delivery of products or services:

• Leadership and CXO, especially CIO, CTO, CPO, and CVO
• Transformation and evolution leads and change agents
• Value stream architects, managers, engineers
• Scrum Masters, agile and DevOps coaches and facilitators
• Portfolio, product and project managers, and owners
• Business analysts
• Architects, developers, and engineers
• Release and environment managers
• IT Ops, service and support desk workers
• Customer experience and success professionals

Course Objectives

• Describe the origins of value stream management and key concepts such as flow, value, and delivery
• Describe what value stream management is, why it’s needed and the business benefits of its practice
• Describe how lean, agile, DevOps, and ITSM principles contribute to value stream management
• Identify and describe value streams, where they start and end, and how they interconnect
• Identify value stream roles and responsibilities
• Express value streams visually using mapping techniques, define current and target states and hypothesis backlog
• Write value stream flow and realization optimization hypotheses and experiments
• Apply metrics such as touch/processing time, wait/idle time, and cycle time to value streams
• Understand flow metrics and how to access the data to support data-driven conversations and decisions
• Examine value realization metrics and aligning to business outcomes, and how to
• sense and respond to them (outcomes versus outputs)
• Architect a DevOps toolchain alongside a value stream and data connection points
• Design a continuous inspection and adaptation approach for organizational evolution

Course Prerequisites

None, although having a working knowledge of lean, agile, DevOps, and value stream principles will be useful.