I have a confession: I’m having a Hamilton relapse.
Three years ago, the Broadway musical’s soundtrack was playing non-stop in our house. We listened to it over and over on a road trip from Austin to Florida. My husband even surprised me for my 40th birthday by taking me to Chicago to see the play (much cheaper than New York!).
And then, no surprise, we got over it. Perhaps we’d overdone it. We actually couldn’t bear to listen to it anymore.
But then came Disney+ this July, streaming the whole musical with the original Broadway cast and reinfecting me with those songs!
Watching it last week, I was most moved by the performance of Christopher Jackson singing ‘One Last Time’, George Washington’s farewell address to the American people as he teaches them—by example—about the peaceful transition of power. And he sings, ‘History has its eyes on you’, a refrain in many of the musical’s songs. I love that sentence. I love how it challenges us to leave the right kind of mark.
These past few months, we’ve felt history’s eyes on us here at Tasktop, while we were being evaluated by independent research firm Forrester for its research on value stream management (VSM) solutions. We emerged triumphant from that evaluation, with Tasktop named a Leader in the Forrester Wave™: Value Stream Management Solutions, Q3 2020 report.
Chris Condo, the report’s author, makes a useful distinction between vendor offerings. Some vendors offer VSM bundled with their existing tools, which Chris calls an all-in-one approach. Other vendors offer stand-alone VSM solutions that integrate with an existing toolchain. Tasktop is in the second category, a pure play VSM platform.
Why does that matter? In my experience, it’s about ROI.
Tasktop’s VSM platform is turnkey software that plugs into your organization and sits on top of the existing Agile and DevOps tools where the work gets done. And our customers are realizing benefits within just three days, a mind-blowing time-to-value (TTV).
That rapid TTV is only possible precisely because you don’t use Tasktop to execute any of the actual software development and delivery work. Instead, you use Tasktop to levitate above the entire end-to-end value stream and measure it.
In just a few clicks, you can set up Flow Metrics dashboards for any product value stream and configure desired Integrationer between your tools. It is that simple and that fast to get started. You will immediately get insight into where you can improve speed and velocity for the digital products and platforms that support your business.
All-in-one solutions are different. They require you to use the vendor’s complete suite for your agile planning, release orchestration and change management operations. Onboarding can take time, and if you ever move off their tools or augment them with others, you risk losing your value stream metrics and automations.
I’ve worked closely with many Fortune 100 companies over the last 12 months as they’ve begun practicing value stream management with Tasktop, and I have seen first-hand the tremendous benefits they’ve reaped from our stand-alone VSM solution:
- A healthcare leader doubled its feature Flow Velocity, introducing new business capabilities faster than ever
- A telecom giant was able to change its outsourcing strategy and renegotiate better terms with its managed service partners
- An online investment firm discovered the system bottleneck impeding digital channel innovation and began working to dismantle it
- IT and business consulting firm CGI unlocked capacity equivalent to over 7,500 days per year
For years we’ve evangelized that Agile and DevOps are not enough; that a new tool category of value stream management would become the underpinning of digital transformation. And now, through the work of Forrester and other analyst firms, those ideas are being broadly disseminated to the technology community and written in the annals of history.
At Tasktop, we have every intention to continue leading this category for years to come, with an innovation roadmap that will unlock even more flow in Enterprise IT.
Looking to learn more about Value Stream Management?
