What is a business value stream?

A business value stream represents a chain of business activities that deliver stages of value outcome to the business along that chain.

Every business or business function performs a chain of activities with a beginning and an end. Along this chain, there are distinct groupings of activities that deliver specific business outcomes and add value to the business. We call these the value stages. A sequence of the value stages makes up the business value stream.

In the following example, we have a chain of business activities for sourcing, qualifying and hiring employees, all the way through to the employee’s exit. We group the chain of activities into value stages such as Recruitment, Onboarding and so on, where each stage delivers a specific business outcome. All the value stages, from recruitment through to retirement, form our value stream called Recruitment to Retirement.

A business value stream may represent a short or a long chain of business activities or stages. The represented end to end of a value stream is subject to what you need to describe within the context of what you want to communicate and achieve. Using the above example, the value stream could have been Recruitment to Performing or just Recruitment to Onboarding.

Why are business value streams used?

A business value stream is a representation of the business activities at a macro level that helps with:

1. Simplifying communication. It creates a common understanding of the high-level business processes and activities with both technical and non-technical team members by abstracting the process details into a digestible form, such as Recruitment to Retirement;
2. Clarifying the business purpose, outcomes and values delivered by the activities;
3. Identifying opportunities for improvement and value creation by analysing the value stages in manageable chunks; and
4. Providing a framework or reference point for deriving and understanding other aspects of the business, such as the Business Capabilities.

Coming soon to Jibility – value stream mapping

Jibility is a simplified business architecture tool for capability-based strategic roadmap development. Capability mapping is a core feature of Jibility, but we are also incorporating the ability to map value streams.

Below is an example of a Marketing to Customer Success value streams and the corresponding business capabilities associated with each value stage: