An organization wants to introduce a new service. There are many teams that will contribute to the design, development and transition of the service. Which approach should the organization follow when creating a value stream for this new service?

A value stream represents the end-to-end series of activities required to create and deliver value to a consumer. When multiple teams contribute to a single service, creating one overarching value stream provides a holistic, shared vision of the entire workflow. This end-to-end perspective is critical in a High Velocity IT environment to visualize the flow of work, identify constraints and bottlenecks across team boundaries, and optimize the entire system for speed and quality. It ensures all teams understand how their contributions fit together to deliver the final outcome, breaking down functional silos and fostering collaboration towards a common goal.

B. The 'four dimensions' are lenses through which to analyze a value stream; they are not separate value streams. This approach would incorrectly fragment the holistic view.
C. A value stream should represent the continuous flow of value, not be artificially segmented by project phases. This would create handoff delays and obscure the end-to-end process.
D. Creating a value stream for each team reinforces organizational silos and focuses on team-specific outputs rather than the integrated flow of value to the customer.

1. AXELOS, ITIL® 4 Specialist: High-velocity IT (2020), Section 3.3.1, 'Use value stream mapping to understand and improve the flow of work': "Value stream mapping helps to visualize the flow of work from end to end... It helps to identify where the bottlenecks are and where there are opportunities to improve the flow." This supports the need for an end-to-end, holistic view (Answer A) rather than fragmented views (Answers B, C, D).

2. AXELOS, ITIL® 4 Foundation (2019), Section 4.5, 'Service value streams': "A value stream is a series of steps an organization undertakes to create and deliver products and services to consumers." This core definition emphasizes a single, complete series of steps for a given outcome, aligning with the concept of one value stream for the entire project.

3. AXELOS, ITIL® 4 Specialist: High-velocity IT (2020), Section 2.2.3, 'Value streams and processes': This section reinforces that value streams are specifically designed to see the "big picture" and understand how value is actually created, which is lost when the view is siloed by team, phase, or dimension.