December 06, 2022
Jellyfish is proud to share that we have been named a Strong Performer on Forrester’s 2022 Wave for Value Stream Management (VSM) solutions despite the fact that our platform is not a VSM tool. This is no mistake.
Jellyfish is not a VSM vendor. But our Engineering Management Platform has such a novel way of tying engineering work to business value, unlocking operational effectiveness of teams, and facilitating value delivery, that it has earned us a spot on the Forrester Wave for VSMs anyway. In fact, Jellyfish ranked as a Strong Performer despite this being our first year included in the the Wave and being ranked against vendors who are building dedicated VSM solutions. And we spiked in strategy – a nod from Forrester that Jellyfish is building something new, and different, but more impactful than what VSM was able to provide in the past.
Value Stream Management is an essential piece of a bigger puzzle
Value Stream Management is an evolution of DevOps thinking. It advocates breaking down and mapping the steps of a software development process, and tracing the flow of “value” from idea, through these steps, to the ultimate delivery to customers. This shifts the focus of product development teams from how fast, or with what quality they can ship code to how well they are able to deliver value to customers. To that end, teams improve processes, manage resources, and implement practices that facilitate value streams. In other words, focus on outcomes over outputs.
In that sense, Value Stream Management is indeed essential to how Engineering Leaders, as Business leaders in the modern world, need to think. But Engineering teams and their leaders need to do a whole lot more than simply visualize and improve value streams. Modern software leaders need to inform strategic business decisions, they need to plan budgets, they need to manage teams of people – empower them, build their careers, unlock new skills. These are far more complex challenges, but they have immense ramifications for the success of the business.
Engineering Management Platforms fill the gaps
Engineering Management Platforms (EMP) integrate, contextualize, and fuse data across key development systems, quantify engineering effort, and surface purpose-built insights into not only the software development lifecycle and flow of value through it, but also into the health of teams themselves, the investments being made, financial decisions, and communication with the rest of the organization. An advanced EMP should enable teams along five vectors:
- Measure the investment of engineering efforts to improve business & engineering decision-making.
- Continuously improve engineering operations & processes to accelerate the delivery of value.
- Monitor, communicate, & facilitate the progress of engineering projects / deliverables in flight.
- Empower engineering management to more effectively manage, enable, & support teams.
- Automate financial analysis and workflows to drive more effective R&D and business outcomes.
A Vision for Engineering Management
We’re thrilled to be recognized by Forrester for our VSM capabilities, but we are more excited to see recognition for our product strategy, employing a novel and forward-thinking approach to empowering engineering teams. We see value stream management as an integral part of our vision to empower engineering teams and their leaders to translate and maximize the impact that the work they do has on the business. But in order to achieve that vision, an Engineering Management Platform needs to be more.
If you want to understand how the work your engineering team is doing aligns with value to customers and your company, if you want to visualize, map out, and improve your team’s development process to more effectively and efficiently deliver that value, if you need to understand exactly what this is all costing the business and drive answers to the truly tough questions, the tradeoffs that need to be made, the areas where investment is needed, the capacity to take on your roadmap – Jellyfish’s Engineering Management Platform (with some VSM capabilities!) is the solution.
