Create, Deliver and Support: Value Streams, Teams and Operations
Create, Deliver and Support is about how services are produced: value stream and workflow design, team structures and culture, and the operational practices that keep services running.
Value streams and flow
- A value stream is the set of steps and handoffs an organization uses to create and deliver a product or service; it combines value chain activities.
- Map it in swimlanes: steps, queues, wait time versus touch time, rework loops, decision points. Find the constraint and improve there first.
- Design for flow: limit work in progress (Kanban), pull work rather than push it, make work visible, and remove handoffs and approvals that add no value.
Teams and culture
Cross-functional, product-oriented teams with end-to-end accountability ("you build it, you run it"). T-shaped skills, psychological safety and blameless post-incident reviews.
Practices in scope
Incident management restores service quickly, and swarming usually beats escalation chains; problem management finds root causes and records known errors and workarounds; change enablement classifies changes by risk (standard, normal, emergency); service requests follow a predefined path; release management and deployment management are distinct; service validation and testing, knowledge management, monitoring and event management, service catalogue, IT asset and configuration management.
Worked example
Checkout fails for 20% of users. The value stream runs: monitoring alert, service desk, triage, swarm to restore, post-incident review, problem record, known error, fix through change enablement. Reasoning: restoring service and finding the cause are different practices with different clocks; the workaround becomes knowledge that shortens the next incident.
Traps
Treating "shift left" as offshoring work. Confusing release (making functionality available) with deployment (installing it). Routing every change through a CAB. Logging incidents without ever linking them to problems.