4 Lessons for Striking the Right Note with Your Teams

Your pile of unread messages is teetering on the verge of collapse. Your phone is blowing up. The day is packed. Finding composure in the storm is tough, but as a leader, you have no choice when communicating with your teams. Hitting the right note is a constant challenge. Team coordination has largely shifted from...

The Flow Framework™ – Treating risk items as a security cost

In the Flow Framework™ there are four flow items that provide value to the end-user of your product: Features (new business value) Defects (quality) Technical debt (removal of impediments to future delivery) Risk (security, governance, compliance) A software organization must devote time to each flow item as they are all crucial to a strong product....

The Journey Towards Embracing Agile: A Holistic Approach for the PMO

The past four blogs in our series are based on the whitepaper, The Agile PMO: 5 Steps to Driving Agility at Scale and have centered around how the PMO can guide the enterprise towards greater agility. It requires the PMO to reinvent itself from a central command organization to one that enables and empowers with...

How One Woman Changed Sin City – Part One 

You might not know it, but your mom’s favorite singer also happens to be one of the world’s best-selling recording artists of all-time, and the woman that potentially saved Las Vegas. While she is best known for her soaring vocals, powerful ballads, and French-Canadian accent, Celine Dion also holds the record for Las Vegas’ two...

Why You Need an Agile Culture Shift

SCALING AGILE THROUGH THE CREATION OF STABLE TEAMS OF TEAMS Agile has been around for a while now. Since the birth of the Agile Manifesto in 2001, companies of all sizes have dipped their toes into Agile methodologies. Many organizations start small with pockets of teams “doing” Agile. These grassroots efforts are great for a...

Winning Ideas and Beyond: 4 Steps to Effective Product Concept Development Workshops

Are you utilizing concept development workshops as part of your ideation processes? Are you coming up with and executing on winning ideas? If not, you’ve come to the right place. This blog post will help you understand the value of concept development workshops and the steps you can take to find out if those winning...

How to drive customer obsessed Product Development

At Tasktop our Product, Engineering and UX teams operate under a single umbrella called ‘Product Development’ to make all our value streams “customer-obsessed”. Our teams do not work in silos or a single project, rather they are focused on optimizing the value stream for a single product – such as Tasktop Integration Hub – to...

How to Better Allocate Your Time for Success

Effective time allocation does not necessarily mean putting more time in, it is about making the best use of the time which has already been given to something and can often be the difference between success and failure in a project. Putting time management skills to use has effects across every aspect of a project,...

Lean Portfolio Management: Lean Budgets and Investment Funding

This blog is part of a series on Lean portfolio management. If you haven’t already, we recommend reading part one first, “What is Lean Portfolio Management,” which you can find here . In the first installment of this series, we discussed why modern enterprises need Lean portfolio management and the specific elements that make Lean organizations...

Improving your Project’s Visibility Within Your Organization

Every project manager would love to be able to know exactly what’s happening within their project at any given time. For other stakeholders, further outside of this information loop, such a dream is even more fanciful. Outside of some kind of project visibility superpower, unfortunately, such immediate and actionable insight is impossible. However, that doesn’t...