Latte Art and the Art of the Agile Team

These past eight months I’’ve spent working at Tasktop, I’’ve picked up some truly interesting and marketable skills. Among the expected skills for a Quality Assurance Engineer (attention to detail, ability to assess large swaths of code for functionality, critical thinking for creating tests, communication skills) one of the skills my colleagues point out is the fine...

Driving Digital Innovation through Crowdsourcing

Prioritizing digital innovation is only one of the many challenges leaders face in today’s idea-driven business climate. And it’s not something to table until bandwidths and budgets are better — it’s critical right now. Company leaders need a simple but effective way to align existing resources to better focus on digital innovation, or they’re putting their businesses...

Your People Are Falling Through The Cracks (Part 3)

In part one of this series, we talked about how resource planning is key to the success of any long term project. Without proper planning, there is no way to effectively plan resources and schedule accordingly while being able to rely on that data to continue with workflows. We continued the discussion of successful resource...

Blueprint Guest Blog: Improving Accuracy On Large-Scale Agile Projects

Defining complete, accurate software requirements has long challenged organizations, and those challenges have grown exponentially, particularly in large organizations delivering sizeable projects in complex environments. The business environment has become increasingly urgent as new customer demands compel organizations to innovate quickly to capitalize on fleeting opportunities. Business needs IT to deliver faster than ever. At...

Top 10 Innovation Links of the Week: 11.13.15

Welcome to our brand new weekly link roundup, featuring a carefully curated selection of hand-picked links to great content on innovation, crowdsourcing, and more from around the web. Here are our 10 favorite discoveries from this week. 1. 5 Requirements of a Truly Innovative Company Who it’s from: Harvard Business Review The skinny: Renowned innovation leader,...

5 Ways to Find Slack Time for Critical IT Improvements

As an IT department, you receive so many requests that you often have to put your own long-term improvements on the back burner. When you finally come up for air, you realize that your tech platform left the “patchable” state a long time ago — and now it’s burning. You need slack time to make...

Are You Wasting Valuable Time Managing Projects?

How many hours a week are you wasting when it comes to day-to-day job stress, complex internal processes, and completing tasks outside your main role? The answer may depend on whether you live in Europe or the United States. In Europe, Project Managers report wasting up to three hours per week or 20 working days...

A Bigger Boat or a Smaller Shark?

[Jaws theme song] Duuun dun duuun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun… In the 1975 Stephen Spielberg film Jaws, actor Roy Schneider (aka Brody) famously states “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” This is also a great analogy from Jerry Manas’ latest book The Resource Management and Capacity Planning Handbook and one that IT...

New Work Management App: Planning, Teamwork and Personal To-Dos in One Tool

Finally, after months of preparations, we are today releasing the full version of our new Projectplace app for teams and small organizations to manage their work and get things done. All essential tools for work and project management are now available for all team members for the first time: Planning, teamwork and personal task management in one integrated, seamless,...

Focus on Business, Not Technology

Technology Portfolio Management (TPM) has traditionally focused on reducing the cost and risk of IT through technology standardization and governing projects that alter the IT landscape. We have noticed a maturing trend as TPM moves beyond these fundamental tasks. While there are many factors contributing to this, there are three noteworthy themes we see fairly...