Accelerating Value Delivery in Highly Complex Domains
Integrating Value Stream Management, System Architecture, and Lean/Agile Execution
Jennifer Fawcett, Kelli Houston, Suzette Johnson (Northrop Grumman), Brian Moore & Robin Yeman (Leidos)
This paper provides practical guidance on how to apply Lean, Agile, and Industrial DevOps (IDO) concepts to enable organizations developing large solutions in complex domains to organize around value, so they can maximize the delivery of value with the least amount of time and effort.
This paper provides an example, based on a missile system, of how to go from an operational value stream to the nested development value streams that build and deliver the solutions within the operational value stream, to an organizational design and Lean/Agile operating system that enables optimal execution of those value streams. If you are experiencing challenges in value stream identification, decomposition, and organization design, our intent is that you can use the information in this paper to help guide your reasoning process.
The paper concludes with a discussion on additional topics to consider when designing value streams to ensure that the time investment made is set up to deliver high-quality solutions at the speed of relevance. By sharing this information, we hope to deepen the understanding in our community on how to leverage the power of value streams in the delivery of large solutions in complex domains.
Special gratitude to our reviewers. We appreciate your time and contributions: JB Brockman, Rune Christensen, Nicolas Friberg, Harry Koehnemann, Marc Rix, and Glenn Smith.
What's inside
Practical Guidance — Applies the principles of Industrial DevOps in a practical case study.
Step-By-Step — Shows teams how to apply the guidance in a simple, step-by-step process.
Expert Authors — Written by a team of experts in the field who have applied these principles in highly-complex scenarios.
Improving Flow — Helps teams of complex cyber-physical systems apply the principles of Industrial DevOps to improve flow.
Pages
22
Publication Date
January 19, 2024
Topics
Software Delivery & Architecture
Formats
epub · pdf
License
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA
About the authors
5 authors
Jennifer FawcettSAFe Fellow & SPCT▼▲
Jennifer is a semi-retired empathetic Lean and Agile leader, practitioner, coach, speaker, and consultant. A SAFe Fellow, she contributed to and helped develop SAFe content and courseware. Her passion has been in delivering value in the workplace and by understanding the science of social communities, communication, and culture. Other areas of focus included product management, product ownership, and compassionate leadership. She has provided dedicated service in these areas to enterprises for over forty years.
Kelli has over thirty-five years of experience in software engineering, solution architecting, project management, and business transformation consulting. She is passionate about empowering teams and driving business outcomes, enabling teams of all sizes to maximize their value delivery. As a Lockheed Martin Associate Fellow, Kelli is responsible for driving the adoption of Lean and Agile best practices, working across the organization to define the transformation strategy, coach teams, and capture successful patterns that accelerate the delivery of business outcomes and ensure knowledge continuity. Kelli holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in engineering, multiple agile and coaching certifications, and has authored several books. When Kelli isn’t leading transformations, you can find her practicing yoga, cycling, or diving into a great book. She also enjoys spending quality time with her two grown children and husband of thirty-five years.
Dr. Suzette Johnson is an award-winning author who has spent most of her career in the aerospace defense industry working for Northrop Grumman Corporation. Suzette was the enterprise Lean/Agile transformation lead. In this role, she launched the Northrop Grumman Agile Community of Practice and the Lean/Agile Center of Excellence. She has supported over a hundred enterprise, government, and DoD transitions to and the maturation of Lean-Agile principles and engineering development practices. She has also trained and coached over four thousand individuals on Lean/Agile principles and practices and delivered more than one hundred presentations on Lean/Agile at conferences both nationally and abroad. Her current role is as Northrop Grumman Fellow and Technical Fellow Emeritus, where she continues to actively drive the adoption of Lean/Agile principles with leadership at the portfolio levels and within cyber-physical solutions, specifically within the space sector. As a mentor, coach, and leader, she launched the Women in Computing, Johns Hopkins University Chapter; the Women in Leadership Development program; the Northrop Grumman Lean-Agile Center of Excellence; and the NDIA ADAPT (Agile Delivery for Agencies, Programs, and Teams) working group. She received a Doctorate of Management at the University of Maryland with a dissertation focused on investigating the impact of leadership styles on software project outcomes in traditional and Agile engineering environments. She am also a Certified Agile Enterprise Coach and Scaled Agile Program Consultant/SPCT
Brian J. Moore is an RTX Principal in and was one of the architects of RTX dual operating system CORE (Customer-Oriented Results and Excellence). His current assignment is in Enterprise Service where he is leading efforts to ensure that the ES operations are lean, agile, and digital. Brian has over three decades of experience in applying Lean and Agile across a wide range of development and operational value streams. He has worked in IT strategy, enterprise architecture, and systems engineering assignments related to cloud computing, collaboration environments, knowledge management, digital thread, product data management, and service-oriented architecture. He also led the creation of Raytheon’s IT sustainability program that won six industry awards and was featured on CNBC. Brian is a SAFe iSPCT, has a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Colorado, and a master’s degree in enterprise architecture from the University of Texas at Dallas.
Robin Yeman has spent twenty-six years working at Lockheed Martin as a senior technical fellow building large systems including everything from submarines to satellites. Robin lead the Agile community of practice supporting a workforce of 120,000 people. Her initial experience with Lean practices began in the late 90’s. In 2002 shen had the opportunity to lead her first Agile program with multiple scrum teams. After she had a couple months of experience, she was hooked and never turned back. She both led and supported Agile Transformations for intelligence, federal, department of defense organizations over the next two decades and each one was more exciting and challenging than the last. In 2012 she had the opportunity to extend our Agile practices into DevOps which added extensive automation and tightened our feedback loops providing even larger results. Currently she is consulting for a range of Fortune 500 companies in highly regulated environments enabling them to achieve the same results we experienced at Lockheed Martin. She engages in everything from automotive, pharmaceuticals, and energy reimagining legacy to modern solutions using all of the tools in my toolbox including Agile, DevOps, Lean, Digital Engineering, Systems Theory, Design Thinking and more. Her goal is to make a positive impact for those around her. Robin is a continuous learner. Her education includes a Bachelor's Degree from Syracuse Univision in Computer Information Systems, a Master's degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Software Engineering, and she is currently pursuing a PhD in Systems Engineering at Colorado State University, where she is working on my contribution to demonstrate empirical data of the benefits of implementing Agile and DevOps for safety critical cyber-physical systems.
