Accelerate Shifting Left with Value Stream Optimization

This is a common problematic scenario when development teams and project management teams use different tools and they have to exchange data and insights manually. This leads to miscommunication through the development value stream. When you integrate these tools, it empowers the teams to collaborate better as there is complete traceability of stories and bugs.
In this webinar, we will demonstrate how integrating Jira Software and Azure DevOps can help developers and project managers stay up-to-date on feature requirements and associated statuses. We will show you how stories sync from Jira to ADO, how the story is then implemented by developers in ADO. We’ll then generate bugs in ADO associated with the story. Those bugs will sync back to Jira and relate to the original story.

Watch this interesting talk by Lance Knight at VSM DevCon 2021, where he discusses the lean decision filter and applying it to improve both Value and Flow.

Over the past few years, there has been a renewed interest in value stream management in software delivery and development. This renewed interest is focused mostly on improving Flow. Companies are assuming that focusing on Flow is a way to improve business outcomes with their digital transformation initiatives. Still, as they become more efficient, they realize they’re not delivering any more value to their customers. The lean decision filter of Value Trumps Flow, Flow Trumps Waste Elimination, and Eliminate Waste to Improve Efficiency as defined by David J Anderson can help organizations decide what to improve and what impact the improvement of Flow and removing waste may have on business value.

Whether you are a product leader wanting to know where work is piling up, how to decrease time-to-market and increase time-to-value, or a business leader wanting to look at the overall creation of value, metrics that show you the health of a value stream are critical to making better decisions and taking the right actions. In this webinar, we will show you how you can drive transparency, efficiency and optimization through real-time metrics. ConnectALL Insights measures flow, DevOps, business and lean metrics from any source, helping you identify opportunities to improve flow, execute on your DevOps initiatives, and meet the key objectives set by the business. Some of the important flow metrics you may want to consider are Cycle Time (CT), Lead Time (LT), Work in Process (WIP), Throughput, while some of the business metrics include Quality Metrics, Portfolio metrics, Product Value, Future Investments. We will also show you how to track Deployment Frequency (DF), Mean Lead Time (MLT), Mean Time To Recover (MTTR) and Change Failure Rate (CFR) to measure how well your dev teams deliver high quality software to your customers faster.

ConnectALL believes that organizations need to revisit their metrics strategy if they want to demystify their value streams and identify real business opportunities. Otherwise, the most valuable benefits may be obscured behind a focus on secondary outcomes.

How does an organization determine the most impactful value stream metrics based on their business objectives?

How do you know if your value stream metrics are illuminating real opportunities for improvement?

Join Jason Bloomberg, President and Analyst at Intellyx, as he discusses this perspective and more with ConnectALL executives Lance Knight (President & COO) and Andrew Fuqua (VP of Products).

As part of release management, enforcing compliance controls -- such as synchronization of data according to specified criteria -- will decrease security risks that could affect quality and reliability. In this webinar, we will show you how ConnectALL can obey the toll gates that are in place in an organization. Let’s take an example of incident escalations between ServiceNow and Azure DevOps. The incident will not move from ServiceNow to Azure DevOps until it is decided that an escalation is needed. Similarly, a Change Request might not move to production until all of the Tasks are complete and the Change is approved.

In this webinar, we will show how traceability is a big part of change and risk management. As an incident moves through the value stream, ConnectALL Insights can capture the different things that happen along the way. The end result will be a dashboard that shows all of the things that happened to resolve the incident, allowing a change manager to perform a risk assessment to code in production. Some of the important DORA metrics that need to be tracked are Deployment Frequency (DF), Mean Lead Time (MLT), Mean Time To Recover (MTTR) and Change Failure Rate (CFR). DORA metrics measure how well your dev teams deliver high quality software to your customers faster.

Automation is more than having code covered by tests and defining features and scenarios triggered by some build jobs. It is about automating the results; about closing a feedback loop between QA and Development. In this webinar, we will demonstrate how you can improve the reliability and quality of releases via automation. We will run automated tests in Cucumber and the results will be posted back to Azure DevOps. When tests fail in testing tools, the results find their way back to the dev team automatically.

Are you using Azure DevOps to remediate critical severity bugs and incidents? Instead of reactively waiting for management to ask, "how are we coming along on that bug blocking ordering?" — why not proactively notify a Slack Channel? With ConnectALL, you can quickly push updates to a pre-specified Slack Channel for progress on critical severity bugs. Whenever the status changes, or a comment is added, a group Slack channel is updated. Invite your management team to an "All Eyes" channel in Slack where they can quickly search through the channel.

Are you using Azure DevOps to remediate critical severity bugs and incidents? Instead of reactively waiting for management to ask, "how are we coming along on that bug blocking ordering?" — why not proactively notify a Slack Channel? With ConnectALL, you can quickly push updates to a pre-specified Slack Channel for progress on critical severity bugs. Whenever the status changes, or a comment is added, a group Slack channel is updated. Invite your management team to an "All Eyes" channel in Slack where they can quickly search through the channel.

Automating workflows in a software delivery pipeline is critical to accelerating your DevOps practice. In this webinar, we will demonstrate Workflow Orchestration, an integral capability of a Value Stream Management Platform and show you how you can easily automate workflows. Integrating an automation server like Jenkins into an Azure pipeline enables deployment of Continuous Integration builds. Whenever you trigger your Azure release pipeline, the artifacts published by the Jenkins job are downloaded and made available for your deployment. You get full traceability of your workflow, including the commits associated with each job.

Automating workflows in a software delivery pipeline is critical to accelerating your DevOps practice. In this webinar, we will demonstrate Workflow Orchestration, an integral capability of a Value Stream Management Platform and show you how you can easily automate workflows. Integrating an automation server like Jenkins into an Azure pipeline enables deployment of Continuous Integration builds. Whenever you trigger your Azure release pipeline, the artifacts published by the Jenkins job are downloaded and made available for your deployment. You get full traceability of your workflow, including the commits associated with each job.

Visibility and traceability enables IT and business teams to communicate faster and smarter. In this webinar, we will show you how Tool Integration, an integral part of Value Stream Management, will help you gain an enhanced view of the processes and steps from incident or problem ticket submission to resolution, including shipment from your development team.

We will demonstrate:
- The integration between ServiceNow and Azure DevOps
- How end-to-end traceability assists you in streamlining your processes and highlighting bottlenecks - How to optimize and accelerate toward delivery of your fixes and enhancements

In an organization with a large number of service requests, customers often complain about how long it takes for requests to be fulfilled. Service request management makes it easy for customers to get solutions for issues and provides a streamlined request fulfilment to deliver optimum service. In this webinar, we will demonstrate how ConnectALL gets the request in the hands of the fulfiller faster and more accurately. When requests are being managed in two separate applications, there is a lot of duplication of entries. For example, ServiceNow requests are items like "Order a MacBook", "Provision a server", etc. A requester will log into ServiceNow, search a company catalog, and submit an order. Oftentimes, the team fulfilling the request works in a different application, such as Jira Software. This can be resolved with a simple integration between the two applications and mapping the flow of requests, their statuses, and other details.

Whether you are a product leader wanting to know where work is piling up, how to decrease time-to-market and increase time-to-value, or a business leader wanting to look at the overall creation of value, metrics that show you the health of a value stream are critical to making better decisions and taking the right actions. In this webinar, we will show you how you can drive transparency, efficiency and optimization through real-time metrics. ConnectALL Insights measures flow, DevOps, business and lean metrics from any source, helping you identify opportunities to improve flow, execute on your DevOps initiatives, and meet the key objectives set by the business. Some of the important flow metrics you may want to consider are Cycle Time (CT), Lead Time (LT), Work in Process (WIP), Throughput, while some of the business metrics include Quality Metrics, Portfolio metrics, Product Value, Future Investments. We will also show you how to track Deployment Frequency (DF), Mean Lead Time (MLT), Mean Time To Recover (MTTR) and Change Failure Rate (CFR) to measure how well your dev teams deliver high quality software to your customers faster.

To understand what value stream management is, do we need to answer another question first?

There are a few definitions of Value Stream Management (VSM) floating around out there. Most seem pretty good, but they are vague out of necessity. That’s because value stream management is a very broad concept. Given the hype around these three words, and how it’s often shortened even further to two words, there is a lot of confusion.

This panel of industry experts will discuss an answer to the critical preliminary question: What ISN'T value stream management?

Watch Lance Knight, President & COO, ConnectALL, Andrew Fuqua, VP of Products, ConnectALL, and Chris Nowak, Director, DevOps Advisory & Adoption, HCL UrbanCode, in this insightful conversation from VSM DevCon 2021, hosted by SD Times, on March 10. David Rubinstein, Editor-in-Chief, SD Times serves as discussion moderator.

The panel discusses the misconceptions about VSM that lead to critical mistakes, share a better understanding of what VSM really is and about what VSM helps organizations achieve and how VSM can help businesses drive their objectives and goals.

For more information on how ConnectALL helps organizations accelerate software delivery with value stream management, visit www.connectall.com.

As part of release management, enforcing compliance controls -- such as synchronization of data according to specified criteria -- will decrease security risks that could affect quality and reliability. In this webinar, we will show you how ConnectALL can obey the toll gates that are in place in an organization. Let’s take an example of incident escalations between ServiceNow and Azure DevOps. The incident will not move from ServiceNow to Azure DevOps until it is decided that an escalation is needed. Similarly, a Change Request might not move to production until all of the Tasks are complete and the Change is approved.

In this webinar, we will show how traceability is a big part of change and risk management. As an incident moves through the value stream, ConnectALL Insights can capture the different things that happen along the way. The end result will be a dashboard that shows all of the things that happened to resolve the incident, allowing a change manager to perform a risk assessment to code in production. Some of the important DORA metrics that need to be tracked are Deployment Frequency (DF), Mean Lead Time (MLT), Mean Time To Recover (MTTR) and Change Failure Rate (CFR). DORA metrics measure how well your dev teams deliver high quality software to your customers faster.