A Value Stream is simply the sequence of all of the activities that an organization takes to deliver on a customer need — and all of the people, systems, and resources required to do those activities.

The term Value Stream originated in the Lean manufacturing movement to describe and optimize how material and information flows. Customers may be external or internal, and are whoever receives the value created by the Value Stream. The concept of Value Streams is foundational to the Project to Product movement and SAFe, as well as essential to any Agile and DevOps transformation. So how is this seemingly simple concept different from a traditional approach to business process and organization? Most organizations today are not organized around the flow of value and are instead organized into functional silos, each working on different slices of value in an asynchronous fashion. The way work is delivered may be known and documented, but the organization isn’t aligned to it or focused on optimizing that value flow.

Value Stream Management (VSM) transforms the organization by moving beyond siloed, isolated departments and temporal project teams, to high-performing Agile and DevOps teams and teams-of-teams, working together, minimizing hand-offs and dependencies, and focused on relentless improvement across the organization.