The Forrester Wave™: Value Stream Management Solutions, Q3 2020

Why Read This Report

In our 30-criterion evaluation of value stream management (VSM) providers, we identified the 11 most significant ones — Atlassian, Blueprint, CloudBees, ConnectALL, Digital.ai, GitLab, IBM, Plutora, ServiceNow, Targetprocess, and Tasktop — and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This report shows how each provider measures up and helps application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals select the right one for their needs.

Strong interest in VSM is driven primarily by three roles: 1) product owners and/or program managers who need data to help drive strategies, set priorities, and unlock team potential; 2) development leaders who use VSM to create connected, automated, and self-governed CI/CD pipelines with observability for improving and accelerating the pace of delivery; and 3) release engineers who use VSM for governance, compliance, and upstream observability to manage risk. (see endnote 3) To serve these roles effectively, customers should look for offerings that demonstrate both breadth and depth of functionality and:

Provide useful and extensible OOTB metrics to create a system of visibility. AD&D leaders often need a crystal ball to predict software delivery dates and discern process trends, but that's not good enough anymore. Look for VSM tools with out-of-the-box (OOTB) metrics that inform leaders on velocity, capacity, types of work being processed, and work in progress to enable leaders to create baselines and determine how well they are executing against plan.

Go beyond metrics by providing deep analytics. Leading vendors Digital.ai, ServiceNow, and Tasktop take metrics to the next level with analytical engines that allow what-if analysis to help leaders test ideas and hypotheses for removing bottlenecks and increasing throughput. Other types of analytics include flow analysis and correlations between events and changes to KPIs. These help leaders understand not only what changed but also what events may have caused that change. As one reference customer noted: "We came to realize that gauging success using velocity was misleading and taking us in the wrong direction. Now we use flow metrics and base our success on delivering value."

Mesh DevOps data with policies to create automated governance and compliance. All AD&D leaders should welcome the ability to place guardrails on software development that also help speed software delivery. As one ServiceNow client from a EU bank told us: "In the past, our policy engine did nothing but require manual steps to enter approval data. However, with VSM, we are now able to marry the data from DevOps with our policy engine to create automated governance. It enables a fully automated CD pipeline." With VSM DevOps, operations become the evidence that satisfies those policies.

Emphasize innovation. VSM is still a nascent category; customers' needs and vendors' innovation to meet those needs will drive its evolution. Innovations such as simulation engines to improve what-if analysis, analytical tools to help correlate events with outcomes, investments in architecture to enable VSM at scale, and investments in AI plus machine learning (ML) to augment decision making are important steps that will progress VSM tools forward.

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