With Planview Viz, executives and practitioners are able to finally gain cross-value stream insights in one consolidated place. The incredible Fortune 100 adoption since its launch has helped us develop and prioritize the features that companies of this size need today to improve their business value delivery.
We’re pleased to announce some exciting new features in Planview Viz. These features include:
- Leading Indicator Analytics
- Embedded Flow Advisory
- Smart modellering
- Product Groups & Favorites
Leading Indicator Analysis
Once you have your baseline Flow Metrics, you ask yourself two questions:
1) What changes can we make to go faster?
2) What changes can we make to ensure we don’t slow down?
Bottleneck detection answers the first question, and now we’re launching Leading Indicator Analysis to answer the second. As part of the Leading Indicator Analysis, we’re showing you the Neglected Work In Progress (WIP), Months to Complete WIP, and your Predicted Flow Time Increase.
Neglected WIP
Too often teams will continue to accept new work without completing their existing WIP. This can be due to either saying ‘yes’ when they should say ‘no’, or by the anti-pattern of only completing the red-hot, urgent fast track work that flows over the top of the stagnating WIP. Planview Viz will now alert you to the fact that your Flow Load (i.e. WIP) is too high when compared to your Flow Velocity and Flow Time. Neglected WIP erodes trust with both your customers and teams as commitments are not met and priorities continue to change.
Months to Complete WIP
In the words of Dominica DeGrandis, author of Making Work Visible and Principal Flow Advisor at Tasktop: “Stop starting and start finishing”. That said, it may be difficult to know when you can start starting again. When will your WIP be low enough to take on more work? Planview Viz will now give you a forward-looking indicator of how long it will take to complete your existing Flow Load.
Predicted Flow Time Increase
Healthy teams want their Flow Times to be as low as possible. As you improve, you’d expect that you complete features and defects faster, resulting in a lower Flow Time. It may seem counter-intuitive, but for teams with significant Neglected WIP, completing the WIP will actually increase their Flow Time. Planview Viz wants to ensure teams understand this and are prepared for potential hard questions, helping you set the right expectations.
Embedded Flow Advisory
The Value Stream Management (VSM) journey is just that…a journey. We realize that on a journey of this magnitude, you need a guide. Our Flow Advisors accompany our customers on their journeys and teach them how to practice data-driven VSM with Flow Metrics. We’re now bottling up our Flow Advisors’ knowledge, expertise and experience and embedding it directly into the product for an on-demand experience.
Experienced Flow Advisors and Value Stream Architects coach Planview Viz users from within the application itself. Drawing on their personal experience at Bell Labs, Nationwide Insurance, Boeing, Oracle, AT&T and IBM, as well as hundreds of hours working with the Fortune 100, these down-to-earth thought leaders are devoted to coaching product leaders, engineering leaders, scrum masters, Agile coaches, system architects and other change agents on data-driven VSM for continuous improvement.
Smart modellering
One of the great things about Planview Viz is the fact that you can easily set up Flow Metrics dashboards for new Product Value Streams. The point-and-click experience takes DBAs out of the metrics equation, instead letting people familiar with the work to select the right data and shape it to their needs. One of the steps is modeling your artifact workflows into the Flow States of “New”, “Active”, “Waiting” and “Done”.
Planview Viz can now take over this step for you. Smart Modeling shortens the time to metrics down to minutes by recommending Flow States for all your native artifact statuses.
Tasktop has analyzed hundreds of value streams and tens of thousands of artifacts to create a pioneering pattern matching algorithm to bring you this new capability, which helps quickly scale across your organization.
Product Groups, Search and Favorites
Planview Viz is built to handle the entire product line of the biggest companies in the world. As part of that, it’s crucial to be able to organize and quickly find the specific value stream of concern. That’s why we’ve introduced three new ways to help you organize and find your value streams:
1. Product Groups
You likely have hundreds of value streams in your company. You need a simple way to organize them within Planview Viz.
We’re pleased to announce the ability to organize products to reflect multi-level product portfolio or organizational structures. Value stream metrics for the contributing products can be viewed at each level of the hierarchy, supporting leadership’s need to oversee more than one product or product line.
The Groups in Planview Viz allow you to have multiple organizational structures. Each Group can contain both Product Value Streams as well as other children Groups. Additionally, a single value stream can be displayed within multiple Groups depending on how you want to organize your teams.
Your individual Product Value Streams are still under the Products section of the left navigation bar.
2. Search
With hundreds of value streams and Groups at different levels, it can be challenging to find the exact thing you’re looking for. That’s why we’ve introduced a Search bar on the left side navigation bar. Search for individual value streams or Groups based on their names.
3. Favorites
Why bother searching for the same thing more than once? Planview Viz has a Favorites capability. Now you can star the products you visit frequently, and they’ll be added to your personal Favorites list on the left navigation bar.
The Easiest, Most Sophisticated Value Stream Management Solution in the Market
Request a personalized product walkthrough and/or have your value stream architecture mapped by one of our Value Stream Architects to see how Tasktop can help you accelerate business value delivery across your software portfolio.
Supercharge your VSM Journey with the Flow Institute
The Flow Institute—the first online community for implementing value stream management (VSM) with the Flow Framework®—offers a steady guiding hand, helping you to harness the rapid feedback loops for continuous improvement that serve the tech oligopoly so well.
Members gain access to custom courses, tailored VSM workshops, c-level roundtables and exclusive content that harvests Tasktop’s deep and profound market-leading knowledge that will enable you to baseline your IT portfolios and rebalance them to adapt quickly to the increasing pace of economic and market change.
Learn more about how the Flow Institute can help you on your VSM journey to become a high-performing tech company sooner.
