End of Year Reviews: Why They’re So Important

End of year reviews are an excellent tool for managers to check in with team members and assess performance, while for employees they are given an opportunity to find out how they are doing and seek advice on improving skills where they need them. That might seem like a positive and rational part of professional...

Atlassian’s Jira Cloud API Change – All you need to know (and how Value Stream Integration means you don’t need to worry)

Software tool vendors, such as Atlassian, can amend their APIs at any moment for multiple reasons. As business needs change rapidly and unexpectedly, developers must integrate new application components into existing architecture to ensure the software is as innovative, functional and responsive as possible for their customers. What this means is that the tools that...

10 Point Checklist for Better Project Estimates

The following content is based on the whitepaper, “Bigger Than a Breadbox: 10 Tips for Better Project Estimates, Part 2,” written by Jerry Manas. For your reading convenience, we’ve decided to give it everlasting life here on the blog. From all the previous six parts of this series, it should be clear that effective estimation...

What is a Workflow (& Why You Need One)

Though there are considerable similarities between project workflow and the management of a specific project, the differences and what they can mean for consistency throughout all of your projects mean that workflow is an important element to understand and integrate into your processes. Project workflow is a system, a default way of approaching every project...

Project to Product – Value Stream Metrics

The review of Project to Product continues from Value Stream Management with the Flow Framework™, with a focus on Value Stream Metrics to track the flow of business value in our software development lifecycle. The Flow Framework™ is a new framework created by Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop. It helps us bridge business and engineering with a common...

Two-Thirds of Millennials Favor Green Collar Jobs

Millennials in the UK, just like in much of the rest of the developed world, are causing much upheaval in the workplace as their shifts in attitude challenges the outlooks and expectations of older management and the organizations they work for. Green collar jobs One significant area of change is the focus on environmental awareness...

Slow Consumer Spending is Impacting UK Retail Sales

The uncertainty for business in the UK remains palpable as the country edges towards its exit from the European Union (EU) in March 2019. The latest figures show that consumer spending has begun to tail off significantly, with total year-to-year UK retail sales of 0.7% for September being much slower than the 2.3% growth for...

10 Trends and Predictions for Software Development and Delivery in 2019  

Earlier this month our CEO, Mik Kersten, studied the tea leaves to provide five predictions for the software industry over the coming decade – but what about the more immediate future? A lot happened in 2018, for both Tasktop and the wider industry, not to mention the geopolitical landscape (but we won’t go into that...

6 Reasons Why Projects are Late

The following content is based on the whitepaper, “Bigger Than a Breadbox: 10 Tips for Better Project Estimates, Part 2,” written by Jerry Manas. For your reading convenience, we’ve decided to give it everlasting life here on the blog. So far in this series, we’ve examined a number of ways to improve problems with project...

Project to Product: Value Stream Management with the Tasktop Flow Framework™

We continue from Remember Value Stream Mapping and drill into the content of Project to Product. With every chapter I read, the significance of the Project to Product book and the Flow Framework™ appears. After reading about the technical revolution, the Age of Software & Digital, and the uncertainty around the next turning point, I was intrigued by...