With nearly 30 years' experience in information technology serving a wide range of sectors, our mission is to help organizations understand how they can take advantage of modern practices to drive more value from their software delivery.
SD ReFocus is a training and consulting company in agility, DevOps/DevSecOps and value stream management. We can co-construct with leaders, teams and individuals an improvement strategy tailored to their unique situation.
Value-Driven
October 2024 - It has been almost a year since I began sharing value-driven news, insights and knowledge about our quest for value on LinkedIn and here. I am pleased to announce that I have now reached a point where I can present a synthesis of all this work.
Here's a new article on "Software Value Realization" giving an overview of the main features of a forthcoming e-book and its accompanying toolkit.
Leveraging Value Stream Management (VSM) Practices
Crises are opportunities to reflect and consider new paths. Whether in our personal or professional lives, crises make us question the meaning of our actions. The current crises are no different for software, and have confirmed the need to refocus on what really matters: customer experience, employee experience, and business value.
Improving customer satisfaction by delivering the expected value maximizes the company's chances of achieving its objectives, and relies primarily on the commitment and skills of its teams.
Although they deliver real engineering benefits, agile, DevOps/DevSecOps, and/or SRE initiatives don't always manage to demonstrate their contribution in terms of value creation for customers or performance impacts for the company.
By adapting lean principles and value stream management practices to software delivery, organizations are better able to:
- Deliver reliable, secure software at the desired or required speed,
- Demonstrate the value created for customers, end-users, the company and team members,
- Measure and celebrate collective improvements,
- Enable a culture of continuous experimentation and adaptation to changing conditions.
Please consult our Whitepaper Value Stream Mapping for Software Delivery (EN) (sdrefocus.com)
Contributing to Shape the Future of VSM
Members of the Value Stream Management Consortium are enterprises, end-users, vendors, and consultants who recognize that VSM is the way to supercharge organizational performance and elevate the role of technologists, optimizing software delivery.
With the Value Stream Management Consortium, I am committed to collaborating in order to advance the future of VSM and our software delivery industry. Whether as an Influencer Member or as Head of Content on the Delivery team for most of 2023, I've had the opportunity to contribute to a number of blog posts. Excerpts can be found here.
For 2024, I'm delighted to announce that I've been selected to join the team of VSMC Ambassadors, who are passionate about driving the adoption of VSM practices around the world. We're here to help you discover these practices, seek resources, and join the VSMC and its communities.
Remember that you can take advantage of the free “Introduction to VSM” microlearning, a glimpse into the more comprehensive “VSM Foundation” course.
Adopting a Holistic Approach to DevOps/DevSecOps Initiatives
Our approach aims to cover the different dimensions of a DevOps transformation and focus on those that address each particular situation.
Too many DevOps or DevSecOps initiatives are still carried out under the almost exclusive lens of automation. Implementing tools to automate processes is essential but insufficient to achieve the desired benefits.
Whether you're just getting started with your DevOps initiative or looking to take it to the next level, be sure to check out our article on using this model to support a continuous improvement dynamic:
Recommendations
Participating in Fundamental Skills Developments
As mentioned above, the performance of our organizations depends first and foremost on human skills and interactions.
In this respect, it seemed fundamental to us, from the very inception of SD ReFocus, to be able to contribute to this effort to develop skills. As a partner of Ahead Technology, we are accredited to deliver DevOps Institute and scrum.org certification courses.
Testimonials
The Climate Emergency Requires us to Work Differently
The latest IPCC report is clear on the extent and origin of climate change. The alert level is at its highest and is already being felt in our daily lives.
Since its creation, SD ReFocus has understood this alert and our duty to act and transform the way we operate.
Our first founding decision is to deliver our services 100% remotely, in order to save on transportation, which represents about 1/3 of greenhouse gas emissions.
Despite a few drawbacks to take into account, the lock-in periods have demonstrated the effectiveness of working remotely for advisory and training services.
Moreover, this choice has the merit of being perfectly consistent with a lean vision of our services by eliminating one of the eight types of waste: unnecessary transport or travel.
Credit: Background photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash
News
February 2024: First edition of our "Value-Driven" newsletter
April 2023: About 200 people trained, more than 95% satisfied or very satisfied, in 100% remote sessions
March 2023: Joined the VSMC's Delivery Team as Head of Content Value Stream
February 2023: Contribution to the VSMC Blog "Is Platform Engineering a Value Stream"
September 2022 : Contribution to the second edition of the VSMC "Value Stream Management Report"
March 2022: Article "The 7 dimensions of a DevOps initiative"
February 2022: Contribution to the VSMC Blog "Is incident Management a Value Stream?"
November 2021: Whitepaper "Value Stream Mapping for Software Delivery" (EN)