Mapping the Value Stream Network Inside Your Whole Organization

Hey everyone, welcome back here to Techstrong TV. I'm delighted to have back the chief flower of Flowtopia. It's flower, chief flower.

Or Chief Flow. My friend, Helen Veal, of the Flowtopia community and organizer of it. Helen, great to see you back.

I thought you would be calling us from New York or something, but I understand your trip was cut off. We had a little hiccup with the airline, had to cancel the flight, and we just weren't going to be there long enough, so we had a bit of a staycation instead. Staycations are always nice.

Yeah. Especially, I like to do things that... You live in a place for your whole life or for 20 years, and there's just places you've never seen or done that you always had on your list.

It's a good time to do them in a staycation. Anyway, I'm sorry you didn't make it to New York, though, and we will- There's always another time ... There's always, we'll always have Paris, as someone said in a movie one time.

Anyway, Helen, let's turn, though, if you don't mind, to Flowtopia. For those maybe who haven't seen on our sites or previous interviews, give us a quick synopsis and dates and what's happening. m.

British Summer Time. m. British Summer Time, to allow us to invite as many people from around the world as possible.

We have 50 incredible live talks from some just totally fantastic speakers, many of whom you're going to see on Techstrong TV over the coming couple of weeks as we get closer to the big day. So join us. You can buy a live pass for $49 and look out for discounts with Techstrong as well.

Excellent. And what is the big day exactly? What date is that?

Big day's June 24th. Wednesday, June 24th. Oh, that's right.

I remember now because I'm going to be in New York. Yeah. And I should mention, well, we didn't mention the website, the whole Circle thing, and all of that.

io. io, you'll find the community itself, which, as you just mentioned, is on Circle, so you can register for free for the community, and you can also find the agenda and details on all of the speakers and their talks for Flowtopia Live 2026 there as well, and get your ticket. Love it.

Yeah. I love it. All right.

You know what? So go to the website. You can get all of that information.

com and some of the other Techstrong sites. But Helen, I wanted to talk today a little bit about value stream networks. I think it's a phrase we all have heard bandied about.

By the way, I love English summertime. Here in the US, we have daylight savings time or standard time. But that doesn't really convey the seasons that it's associated with.

I think we should start calling it US summertime versus- Yeah ... US wintertime. It's common sense.

We don't actually have British wintertime. We have GMT, Greenwich Mean Time. Right.

Well, that's your- Not British summertime ... official. We don't have, Greenwich here is in Connecticut, and it has nothing to do with any time.

But summertime's an elegant way and common sense way of saying it. Same thing with value stream network. Sounds simple enough, but really how many of us out here really understand what we mean when we say value stream networks, and why are they important?

So I think most people that are listening are probably pretty familiar with the value stream mapping exercise, which is- Right ... not like a team-level exercise. Actually, it's more of a cross-team exercise for most people because the reason it's so valuable is because most people have silos in their organizations, and when they start thinking like value streams, they start realizing that their value stream, the end-to-end process of getting an idea to a customer, cuts across multiple teams, and that's why there are so many problems with it, and there are so many delays and so much waste and so much rework has to be done.

So that's where most people start is the realization that there's a value stream. And you can say that anything that creates a product or a service is a value stream. You can say every value stream begins with a customer.

It kind of ends with a customer, begins with a customer. This is a big debate we often have as practitioners. But then there is another realization, which was that if a value stream is anything that's a product or a service as an organization, then the organization itself is made up of value streams.

And we very quickly learn when we start doing value stream mapping that value streams interconnect. They have dependencies. And when we start thinking about the value stream network, we realize that actually our whole organization is made of a number of interconnecting value streams.

And actually, this is another debate that we have at the practitioner level, which is about whether the value stream network is limited to an organization, or whether we start talking about things like value chains in the same context as a supply chain, and actually start talking about how these value streams reach outside of the organization into the surrounding ecosystem of customers and suppliers and partners as well. I love it. Oh.

Now, what are we going to learn at Flowtopia specifically around this? So my two favorite topics today are the combination of flow engineering and outcome engineering, and we have three tracks at Flowtopia Live as well, which are reflecting all of this. So we have product engineering and leadership.

SoLet's pull all of this together. Flow engineering and outcome engineering. With flow engineering, we're really concerned about the efficiency of our value stream, so how it flows, how fast it goes to get things out of the way, get rid of things that we don't need, remove non-value-adding activities.

With outcome engineering, we're much more bothered about the value realization elements, so the efficacy or the efficiency, sorry, the effectiveness of our value stream. So we've got those two kind of engineering capabilities. Then we have our, what we're calling them the tracks on the conference, our product part, our engineering part, and our leadership part.

So the reason we've chosen those tracks is from a value stream perspective, we still tend to separate product and engineering quite a lot. So when we're talking about bringing those teams together in the value stream network, that's kind of like the overall governing team is if we connect product, business, to engineering, tech, we get the end-to-end value stream itself. Then we've got all the value stream network.

Now, this is the leadership part. When we do a value stream map with one product, one service, one team, or one collection of teams, we're really understanding just one piece of it. But when we start to realize that we've mapped or we've started to manage all of our value streams, we then get an organizational picture for leadership, and leadership can start making decisions around things like risk and governance and investment at this point because they can see at a high level how all of their organization connects together, where they have problems.

For example, a really common problem that we learned about in DevOps years ago was what happens when we release a new piece of software. And it's a dangerous time for the team, but it's often a dangerous time for multiple teams, particularly the further we moved into microservices and distributor computing because people share microservices. So we more frequently had unpredictable problems happening.

For example, when someone made a release and they didn't realize that that component of our application was actually shared by those three other teams as well. So that's another reason why the value stream network element is just becoming so important. People are starting to understand that once you build up from a team view of a value stream to an organizational view, it can give you all sorts of insights in terms of how you operate as a business in terms of risk governance and failure.

I was talking to the CEO of a company in the interview before this one, Helen, and she said something. This was about AI. They were talking about AI.

But it was this very thing that when you look at, let's say, the benefits of AI at an individual level, you might think, "Wow, this is great. " You look at the benefits of it at a team level, it's a very different view, right? Some people in the team are accelerating, some aren't, some are using it, some it's helping, some it's not helping.

But you have a very different view than that individual. " And that view, at least today, has nothing to do with what the team level and individual views are because they're so different, because we're looking at it through such different lenses. I think it's the same thing right here- Right.

It's like the token maxing ... when we're talking about... Yeah.

Well, that's exactly what it was about, right? Token maxing. We found out token maxing's not a good thing.

Well... Or necessarily anyway. Yeah.

But this is classically why you want, well, back when I was still, we had the DevOps Institute and we were doing value stream workshops at some of our events and stuff. These are the kinds of things you'd look at, really understanding what was the flow, what made sense, and what didn't make sense, frankly, from a business point of view. And we're still not great at it.

I just caught in the latest- No ... Techstrong News Roundup just now, there was a headline about Project Glasswing and the 10,000 vulnerabilities that have been found and how those vulnerabilities are common across so many organizations. And part of the problem is that the organizations don't have joined-up end-to-end fix processes.

They're doing the same- No ... problems over and over again, and that's just a value stream. I'm in this business.

I'm in security, 25-plus years. Yeah. It's the same problem 25 years ago.

Yeah. We weren't fixing the vulnerabilities we were finding then, let alone the vulnerabilities that Mythos and Glasswing find now. Yeah.

We've always had that problem. Yeah. And I started a company with the idea of fixing that problem, and here we are.

Still didn't fix it. "Plus ça change," as the French would say. Yeah.

As they would. Yeah, exactly. I love it when you talk French.

Anyway, Helen, we're almost out of time. I want to thank people. I want to thank you for coming on and continuing beating the drum here and making people aware.

com and more coming on that, so check it out. We have more discussions with some of the main key speakers, presenters at Flowtopia here on Techstrong TV. io?

Io. Yeah. Or reach out to me on LinkedIn.

I'm pretty easy to find on there. Yes, she is. Yeah.

All righty. All right. Helen, thank you.

I appreciate you coming on. I know it's already late in the day over in UK. Enjoy.

Sorry you didn't get to New York, but I'm glad you had a staycation. Next time. You're scheduled to be back on before the 24th.

I will pop another one back in. Yeah. We'll keep talking.

All right. See you then. Thank you.

Helen Beal, Chief Flow or Flower for Flowtopia. io, check it out. June 24th is the big day.

We're gonna take a break here on Techstrong TV. We'll be back in a moment.