My notes from the DevOps Handbook

by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis

Create a value stream map to see the work

1. The work begins with the product owner in the form of customer request or a business hypothesis.
2. Accepted by developers, implemented, checked in, integrated, tested, deployed to production.

Sufficiently understand the areas in our value stream that are jeopardizing our goals of fast flow, short lead times and reliable customer outcomes. Limit the level of detail being collected - everyone's time is valuable and scarce.

Value stream mapping exercises are always an eye opener. It is the first time when people see how much work and heroics are required to deliver value to the customer.

Focus investigation on:

• places where work must wait weeks or months
• places where significant rework is generated or received

Value stream should only consist of high level process blocks (5 to 15 of them). Each process block should include lead time and process time and %C/A measured by downstream consumers of the output.

Use the metrics from this value stream map to guide improvement efforts. Once we identify metric to improve, we should perform the next level of observations and measurements to better understand the problem and then construct an idealized, future value stream map, which serves as the target condition to achieve by some date.