Version Control and Value Streams: A Developer's Guide to Project Management

Have you ever worked on projects and sometimes it becomes overwhelming to hit the target goals and milestones? Perhaps because unnoticed errors have accumulated and resulted in delays and sometimes a total revision of a project. Well, this often happens especially if there is no efficient tracking system and a robust approach to evaluate each specific activity of a project. Without mapping the progress of each phase of a project, it is easier to miss one of the set targets and sometimes this can be disastrous to specific projects. However, with the advancement in technology and knowledge, this should never happen, especially in the wake of Version Control and Value Stream approaches.

Version Control and Value Streams: A Developer's Guide to Project Management

At the heart of any project is a vibrant team that collaborates daily to meet the set targets and objectives. In meeting these deliverables, a tracking system ought to be in place to make sure every progress is recorded and hence pinpointing any error becomes easier, more so in the early stages of a project. This is what the Version Control Systems (VCS) does. This project management element is a combination of tools and practices that makes it easier for a team to collaborate by providing the capability to track code changes and provide a historical record of the project's development. Click here to get more information about Version Control.

For people in media agencies, VCS can be a powerful and transformative tool especially while working on a project. Let's say, for example, there is a team working on a video ad. This team will obviously have graphic designers, motion experts, layout designers, and many others.

These professionals will often work simultaneously to make sure they beat the deadline and for obvious reasons of reviewing the complete project as a whole and making the appropriate editing in unison. Assuming this team does not have Version Control Systems (VCS) in place, there is an increased likelihood of failing to understand which changes have been made and therefore the probability of having duplicates and errors is increased. The ripple effect of this is having more editing time which ultimately can lead to the delay of a project.

Value streams

Value streams are another parameter that the media agency team can take into consideration. The role of value streams is to map each specific activity that adds value to a project. In other words, it can be said that value streams the end-to-end series of steps and activities required to deliver value to a customer or stakeholder within an organization. So, how can this concept be of any importance to a media agency team? Well, taking an example stated above about a team working on a video ad, value stream can help to get lead of waste.

This is how it works; before getting to the main project, the team will have to first conduct market research, do content creation, then design, and finally deliver the final output distribution. Each of the stated activities is a step on its own. Therefore, to deliver value in each stage, there is a need for mapping to identify the bottlenecks and areas for improvement. By visualizing each stage which can be considered a stream, project managers can gain insights into where time and resources are being spent and bring more value.

Basically, these two elements; Version control and value streams are not isolated concepts. Instead, they complement each other seamlessly. Therefore, by integrating version control into your value stream management, you can achieve a level of efficiency and collaboration that is vital for success in a media agency.