VSM vision visuals for Sep 20th presentation
Proposal
- Create two visuals that Mark P can talk through as part of the VSM vision as part of the Sept 20th presentation.
- The purpose is to highlight two concepts in this broader vision that are compelling and possible only with GitLab.
VSM vision
- Additional background context in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/6323
- Have visibility into the entire DevOps lifecycle from different dimensions:
- Time dimension
- Day-to-day, month-to-month, quarterly, yearly
- Different stakeholders
- Team members, directors, executive leadership
- Time dimension
- GitLab provides this visibility, and gives you actionable insight.
- For example: GitLab tells you that your testing cycles are the major bottleneck to deploying software. You should look into this and figure out why.
- GitLab allows you to configure your value stream
- You can set your own stages. It is up to your team, your department, your organization.
Visual 1
- What does this feature (expressed as as visual solve)? What is the problem?
- As an organization/team, I have a very custom value stream. I may be a small startup that doesn't have a formal testing process yet. Or I may be a big organization where testing is crucial, and I need more formalization with QA and UAT. How does GitLab help me create such a customized configuration?
- How can I use this feature to not only account for useful work, but also wasted time? Per Forrester, one factor that VSM highlights, is that the system should be able to tell you waste time versus useful time.
- Proposal: Some type of UI based on existing GitLab issue boards that allows your team to easily configure your own custom set of stages that thus defines your team/organization's value stream.
- Each column represents a specific stage in my custom flow. For the purpose of the visual, the stages could be:
- Initial Concept
- Stakeholder Feedback
- High-Level Requirements
- Security and Legal Review
- Feature Specification
- Development
- Code Review
- QA
- UAT
- Staging
- Beta
- Production
- Additionally, there should be a way to capture waste in the issue board UI. So that for example, if a feature is under development, but then the person responsible goes on vacation without telling anybody, and then 2 weeks are wasted, then GitLab should be able to log that data (and that surface it you later on).
- One design would be somehow parallel horizontal tracks in the issue board. Using swimlanes may be a way to achieve this.
Visual 2
- What does this feature (expressed as as visual solve)? What is the problem?
- As a team manager, or as a director, or as an executive leader in the organization, I want to know quickly how my team performed in the past month. What are the problem areas?
- I don't want to know the root cause (since this is a problem that probably can't be addressed in the little time we have on Sep 20th). But I want to know at a glance, did I do poorly, say, compared to the previous month.
- Proposal: Some type of data visualization that only represents how well the team performed in the previous month.
- It has average times (and maybe worst and best times) for each stage and the entire cycle.
- It shows percentage of each stage. (e.g. Development time is 50% of the entire cycle), for averages, for example.
- It shows waste versus useful work. E.g., what is the total waste versus total useful. What is it per stage.
- What is the month over month improvement (or if it got worse).
Edited by Annabel Dunstone Gray