It takes months, or even years to deliver business values because there are hundreds of operations required to deliver business value.
To transmit code through the value stream requires multiple departments to work on a variety of tasks, approvals, business team, PO/BA refining, development, functional testing, integration testing, environment creation, server administration, storage administration, networking, load balancing, and information security.
In the below sample Value Stream too many departments involved, which is adding more problem to downstream. Its taking 121 days to deliver an item which is developed in 10 days!
This Ball game simulation I have conducted at Serverless Conference DevOps workshop
Simulation
Pass the ball from source box to destination
Round 1: Simulation with too many hand-offs
- Team of 10 or more will stand next to other
- Ball need to be picked one at a time
- first person will pick the ball from source box and pass it to next person
- Next person who received the ball he passes to next one
- Ball will be passed to last person and he drop in to destination box
- This will repeat till last ball
- Track the time
Round 2: Simulation with less hand-offs
- Lets reduce the no of hand offs by eliminating 7 member
- 5 members will stand next to other
- Ball need to be picked one at a time
- first person will pick the ball from source box and pass it to next person
- Next person who received the ball he passes to next one
- Ball will be passed to last person and he drop in to destination box
- This will repeat till last ball
- Track the time
Round 3: Simulation with less hand-offs
- Lets reduce the no of hand offs by eliminating 4 to 5 member
- 5 members will stand next to other
- Ball need to be picked one at a time
- first person will pick the ball from source box and pass it to next person
- Next person who received the ball he passes to next one
- Ball will be passed to last person and he drop in to destination box
- This will repeat till last ball
- Track the time
Observation – It took just 4 seconds to deliver when compared with too many hand-offs simulation which took 16 seconds
Learning
- Eliminate the waste in value stream
- Reducing no of hand-offs to accelerate the flow of work
- Code deployment should be automated, repeatable, and predictable
- Production-like environments at every stage.
- Enable Continuous integration of code and Enable Continuous delivery pipelines
- Treat Infrastructure as code, Environments must be created in an automated manner
- Make infrastructure easier to rebuild than to repair
- Environments should be stable, reliable, consistent, and secure.
- Build a fast and reliable automated validation test suite
Reference/further reading:
DevOps Games 
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