Objectives The R2D Value Stream is designed to ensure predictable, cost-effective, high quality results to the business while also promoting high levels of re-use, flexibility, speed, and collaboration across IT to support traditional and new methods for service creation and sourcing. Make service delivery predictable, even across geographically dispersed teams, multiple suppliers, and multiple development methodologies. Applications and services today are sourced or developed in cooperation with many different parties. All parties are working with their own processes and tooling. IT must be able to provide a good overview of the planned activities, should speak a common language with all parties involved, and should provide a methodology for how to achieve the highest quality results. Cloud sourcing, agile development, and other innovations have created the need for IT to be able to manage development and delivery of services in a hybrid or multi-sourced environment. Ensure that each Service Release is high quality, fit-for-purpose, and meets customer expectations. IT still experiences too many incidents immediately after release of an application or service into production. IT must establish control over the quality of a service regardless of the number of vendors involved in development and/or delivery. Understand the evolving relationship between planning and building. Historically, estimation has been framed as a trade-off, balancing a prior “planning” phase versus a later “building” phase. However, it is increasingly understood that planning in complex domains requires information only available through iterative attempts to fulfill requirements. In a sense, both planning and building must take place simultaneously in many cases. Standardize service development and delivery to the point where re-use of service components is the norm. IT operations and development must ensure increased quality and speed of service delivery while also lowering costs. In support of these efficiency and quality goals, IT must have a framework in which to drive the re-use of existing service components at multiple stages of the development lifecycle across multiple applications and services. IT must work successfully with multiple internal and external contributors and be able to integrate the data, process, and tools required to work with geographically dispersed teams, outsourcers, and traditional and cloud-based suppliers. Furthermore, IT must maintain control of the governance of the R2D Value Stream and be able to track and measure internal and vendor performance, costs, quality, and on-time delivery. The ability to re-use requirements, source code, documentation, test scripts, service monitors, and other data objects of the service development lifecycle is a key contributor to managing cost, increasing quality and predictability, and accelerating release cycles. Build a culture of collaboration between IT operations and IT development to support Service Release success. IT operations and development must improve collaboration between departments. Development organizations build and test services in a silo and “surprise” IT operations by “throwing release packages over the fence” for immediate delivery. IT operations may not be able to accommodate new technologies and environments fast enough to meet the requirements of developers. Inefficient manual processes are typical, and in high maturity shops are increasingly replaced by fully automated continuous delivery pipelines. Put rigorous information management controls in place to lessen the impact of the IT reality – high staff turnover. High turnover in IT means knowledge is lost and schedules are impacted. Particularly in low-cost labor markets where employers are suffering high employee turnover rates. The R2D Value Stream helps capture the knowledge that would otherwise be lost and cause schedules to be delayed. Drive predictable outcomes without driving out innovation. Innovation and process efficiency are two pillars of competitive advantage that IT departments bring to the business, yet these two pillars often have trouble co-existing. The emphasis on on-time project delivery tends to stifle innovation, creating a conflict between these two priorities. IT must continuously improve its ability to execute in such a way that on-time innovation is the norm. The R2D Value Stream identifies the core automation enablers and the key data exchanges required to accomplish this goal. For example, focusing efforts on automation of test, release, and deployment provides more time and resource for innovation in service design and development. Business Value Proposition The R2D Value Stream describes a prescriptive framework of required functional components and data objects so IT organizations can better control the quality, utility, schedule, and cost of services regardless of the delivery model. The key value propositions for adopting the R2D Value Stream are: - Maximize the pipeline of projects and smaller grained demand requests for faster time-to-market in service realization. - Predictable outcomes that ensure that the application or service delivered actually performs as requested, leading to higher rates of user acceptance and better business alignment. - Establish control points to manage the quality, utility, security, and cost of services, independent of development method or delivery source. - Increased management information for traceability and benchmarking of internal and external service developers and suppliers. - Ensure that all services are designed in accordance with standards and policies (from sources including Corporate Compliance, Enterprise Architecture, Risk Management, IT Financial Management, and so on). - Improved inputs to IT Financial Management on service cost. - Relate applications and services with business value by creating and maintaining the service blueprint. - Accelerate the sourcing and delivery of applications and services through best practices such as: - Re-use – manage, maintain, and leverage re-usable IT components and services. - Automation – identify the core functional components and data required to streamline the R2D Value Stream. - Collaboration – use data to institutionalize collaboration of teams involved in the development lifecycle to expedite releases, and reduce incidents and rework that might otherwise result. This lays the foundation for new paradigms such as DevOps. Value Stream Definition The Requirement to Deploy (R2D) Value Stream contains primary and secondary functional components. Primary functional components are core to the value stream and are essential for managing the service at this stage of its lifecycle. Secondary functional components are not dedicated to R2D but provide relevant data objects to primary functional components. The following functional components in the R2D Value Stream support the definition, development, and governance of the data objects and Service Model entities above: - Build - Build Package - Defect - Project - Release Composition - Requirement - Service Design - Source Control - Test The R2D Value Stream is process-agnostic in that while methods and processes may change (i.e., ITIL, COBIT, agile, waterfall, etc.), the functional components and data objects that comprise the value stream remain constant. The R2D Value Stream provides the framework for creating and sourcing a new or modifying an existing application or service. The R2D Value Stream is triggered if it receives a demand signal from a consumer or from other components such as Problem Management. This may take the form of an approved Scope Agreement and Conceptual Service from the S2P Value Stream, or may be a smaller grained signal such as an individual development story, user story, defect, problem, usage data, or scenario for a specific application or service. The R2D Value Stream ends when the requested service or modification is packaged for immediate or future deployment through an R2F Value Stream Fulfillment Execution functional component.