Project to Product: What Flows Through a Software Value Stream?

Throughout this Project to Product series I’ve explored how we need to bring the same rigor to architecting our software delivery value streams as what we’re witnessing in advanced manufacturing plants. Once we agree on what flows, we can analyze those flows to identify bottlenecks and opportunities to remove them. However, every time I’ve asked...

Seven Strategies for Improving The Performance of Your Team

How to improve work performance is understandably a prominent thought in every project manager’s mind on a nearly-constant basis. Work performance will ultimately determine if a project gets completed successfully, on time and within budget. Poor performance can happen for any one of a million reasons but getting great work performance from your team is...

5 Reasons to Start Kanban

Unless you’ve recently assumed the role of accidental project manager, you’ve probably heard about the Kanban method. Praised for being simple and easy to use, Kanban has helped countless organizations manage tasks and track project workflows. These days, Kanban has moved away from its simplistic index card design. Thanks to advancements in workplace technology, Kanban...

Reducing Cost and Complexity with Application Portfolio Management

In business, as in science, we are bound by basic principles that are immutable. Among them, there’s the notion that nothing is free. In physics it’s known as the law of conservation of energy; in business it’s known by the adage, time is money. Actively managing your application portfolio is a discipline vital to your...

Measuring your software delivery – Flow time vs. Lead time

Last month the entire Tasktop Customer Success team met in Las Vegas ahead of DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018 for our annual face-to-face. During the meeting I had the opportunity to present Tasktop’s own journey into Value Stream Management and the Flow Framework™. There were some great discussions around gathering data and measuring both flow time and lead...

Six Important Influencers in the World of Project Management

In today’s world of seemingly infinite information, discerning who to spend time listening to and who is a waste of time can be a lifelong process. There can often be just too many voices taking different views from a number of angles and, if looking for guidance in your field, like in project management, it...

4 Steps to Effectively Execute on Strategy [Webinar]

According to Gartner, by 2021, 100% of ITPMOs that fail to shift focus toward speed of delivery will be disbanded. That’s a frightening reality, especially considering less than 1/3 of executives currently believe their organizations effectively execute on strategy. How can the ITPMO focus on improving speed of delivery when the organization can’t even deliver...

New Corporate Governance Rules for UK Business

UK businesses are being encouraged to engage better with both their staff and investors through a new corporate governance code of conduct which has been introduced by the Financial Reporting Council (FRC). This has followed some high-profile corporate governance disasters including at Royal Bank of Scotland which required a major government bailout, and more recently...

Planview Horizons: Recognizing Planview Customers for their Exemplary Achievements in WRM

In the words of our CEO Greg Gilmore, “Planview does not happen without our customers.” And this is true across all areas of the business, including Horizons. Now, in its 21st year, Planview Horizons—the Planview Customer Conference—was held October 10-12 at the JW Marriot in downtown Austin, Texas. We had more than 600 attendees come...

Project to Product: Mining the Ground Truth of Enterprise Toolchains

To learn more about what works and what doesn’t in large-scale DevOps and agile deployments, we need data. The problem is, that data is notoriously difficult to get ahold of because much of it lies hidden across numerous private repositories. Efforts such as The State of DevOps reports have helped us gain some understanding by...