Improve Your Engineering Pipeline with Value Streams

**Dan Lines** (0:00)
We know software development and delivery is important. We put a lot of time and capital towards it.
But how do you determine what value you get from all of that investment? Value Stream Management helps you improve, monitor and manage that value. We've brought on Helen Beal. She's a DevOps coach, author and flowologist, and she's here to share how her new research into VSM can help capture and deliver value for your organization.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:34)
This episode is sponsored by LinearB. Give your dev team the power to improve with team-based metrics, high-risk code alerts, and the world's first project board based on real-time Git activity.
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**Dan Lines** (0:48)
Hey everyone, welcome to Dev Interrupted.
I'm your host, Dan Lines, and today I'm joined by DevOps coach, author, and flowologist, Helen Beal. Helen, thanks so much for joining us today.

**Helen Beal** (1:02)
Oh, thanks so much for inviting me to be here. It's a pleasure.

**Dan Lines** (1:06)
Yeah, awesome to have you. And of course, we're gonna dive into your value stream management research, but before we get there, can you tell us a little bit about what else you've been up to? I know you're a strategic advisor for a bunch of different companies, you're a writer, an author, an editor, a chief ambassador, a flowologist. How do you keep everything straight?
Good question.

**Helen Beal** (1:38)
I have what I have been told is referred to as a blended portfolio career, which basically means that I'm an independent consultant and I have a number of rolling contracts. So as you said, I'm the chief ambassador at DevOps Institute. So we have about 200 ambassadors worldwide that are all pioneers in DevOps, all volunteering to help advance the humans of DevOps in the community. But I also, as you said, I provide strategic advisory services to Value Stream Management Platform Company and MOOC's off to AIOps. What else do I do? Yes, there's the chair of the Value Stream Management Consortium. And yeah, I do consulting and coaching as well and do lots of writing. So how do I balance it all? It's not awfully different to when I was a full-time consultant working with a number of clients. It's just there's a number of initiatives going on. There's quite a lot of connection between them. It's not like it's constant contact switching because they're all quite interrelated. So conversations flow across all the parts.

**Dan Lines** (2:36)
Yeah, that's really cool. And for our audience, how did you build your career to this point? Where did you start? And then how did you get involved with DevOps communities and then VSN, Value Stream Management? What did that look like for you?

**Helen Beal** (2:52)
It was completely accidental. It's probably no surprise. I think most people's careers probably are. I actually graduated with a degree in English Literature and Language. So that explains some of the writing, but I didn't really know what to do with it after university. And I looked at journalism and I used to work in a pub and one of the punters there was a journalist and he talked about how I would have to sell my grandmother for a story. And I didn't like the sound of that. And I looked at publishing and was told that was a bit of an old boy's network.
And I was only 21 and didn't feel ready to write a book, hadn't got enough life experience. So I'd done a lot of temping, temporary work during university to earn extra cash, to live and party on at university as we all wanted. So I decided just to carry on temping and I ended up at IBM, latest notes in a sales position. And really that's what started my whole IT career. And really the DevOps journey was via working with latest notes and then working with Domino and WebSphere and more and more of these web platforms, which eventually took me to a place where I was working with deployment automation around the time that DevOps appeared. And a lot of the initial kind of stresses that generated the DevOps movement were in that space, that kind of release moment between the dev team and the IT ops team, where we throw the code over the wall of confusion and all hell breaks loose. So yeah, that's really how I got introduced to DevOps. And it was a really tiny moment for me actually. I'd just worked for a company that we'd sold and I'd made a bit of money and decided to have a sabbatical and I'd write some books and I drove an ambulance to Mongolia and I was kind of bored with technology and then DevOps appeared and it completely regenerated my passion for the industry that we work in.