Polaris Advisor
A Technical Advisory Program

The Data You Need

To Improve the Flow of Work

using real-time engineering signals

• Model your process and code flow delays as queues and map them to process signals from your delivery toolchain.
• Create and maintain optimal flow through development and delivery with Flow Monitoring, focusing on managing the flow at key constraints.
• Identify when work slows or stalls in real time with WIP Monitoring
• Maintain optimally sized product backlogs with Flow Planning.
• Know precisely where your process improvements will yield maximum impact, using the Theory of Constraints.

To Manage Value Streams

with full visibility into true engineering capacity

• Map your value streams to understand how development work streams align to customer journeys.
• Align your engineering capacity to ensure teams are delivering value.
• Make plans using a clear picture of cost to value
• Manage value at risk using capacity budgets
  
• Continually assess value delivered
  

With a Scalable Process Improvement Model

• Value Streams model how you deliver value to customers
• Work Streams and Teams model your product delivery process within a value stream ‍
• Analyze multiple value streams within Organizations
  
• Start by optimizing a single value stream and team, and scale to large products with multiple value streams, organizations, and teams.

Optimize delivery performance across Work Streams, Teams, Value Streams and Organizations supported by the Polaris Platform at each level.

Why it works

In a nutshell, we give you all the data you need to improve the flow of work and the flow of code, throughout your product development process, from ideation through delivery, and show you how to use it to make precise, targeted improvements in your product development process.
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Product development work spends 50% or more of the time waiting in queues.

Typical reasons are multi-tasking, handoffs between people and teams, code reviews, unclear requirements, inefficient branching strategies, and manual QA and release processes.

All these manifest as queueing delays.
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Work stalls, but it's not always clear why.
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If you are not running a shop with modern software engineering practices, almost all of these delays will be due to poor flow of work at the back end: in manual QA, defect flow-backs, and release processes.
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But even if you run a modern shop, queueing delays on the front end of the process can account for over 80% of the remaining process time.
Here, poor information flow manifests as queueing delays.

Reducing these delays is a necessary pre-requisite to improving the end-to -end flow of value in product development.

Eliminating them in the right places means more gets done with the same number of people,
and the work gets done faster.

All with little or no additional investment.

We'll show you how to do that, with hard numbers to back it up.

How it works

Polaris

Polaris is a best-in-class SaaS measurement and process analytics platform
that models the flow of work and the flow of code throughout the product development process with real time updates any time someone pushes code or updates a pull request or ticket.
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A lot of invisible work in software development happens at the code level, and you need to make this work visible and observable to understand where the non-value-added delays are.
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Our techniques are based on mathematically sound, and well-understood principles from queueing theory that have been successfully applied in many fields over the last century.

Polaris takes low-level engineering signals from your delivery toolchain and updates the parameters of a queueing network model in real time.
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This lets you visualize the flow of work in granular detail, and helps identify critical bottlenecks and non-value-added delays in every part of your process.

Polaris simplifies the process of gathering and abstracting the low-level data that drives the high-impact improvements you make to your product development process.
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