Value Stream Management

Value stream management (VSM) in software delivery is a critical approach to success in today's digital landscape. Its systematic approach to measuring and improving flow helps organizations shorten time-to-market, increase throughput, and improve product quality. This VSM blog category provides educational insights, best practices, and real-world advice from Planview and industry experts on how to address the constraints or problems you face in your software delivery lifecycle in order to achieve better business outcomes.

The Core Principles for End-to-End Traceability in Enterprise Software Delivery

Until recently, manual traceability from compliance reporting has held back large organizations from becoming software innovators. Now, enterprise toolchain integration is helping organizations across heavily-regulated industries, such as healthcare, automobile, finance and government, to automate the sophisticated flow of work from ideation to operation, helping them obtain one source of truth into a product’s development....

Improving Flow through Integration in Santa’s Workshop: A Fictional Case Study

This weekend, I was watching the movie Elf and it got me thinking – how does Santa’s Workshop keep up with the demands of a booming population? I saw the manager keeping track of production quotas on a clipboard. There’s a single magical book that contains what everyone wants for Christmas, but it’s unclear how...

A Day in the Life of a … Value Stream Architect

We’re hopping back over the pond today to meet Tina Dankwart, one of our Value Stream Architects! She discusses the importance of building relationships at work, how she annoys her kids with Metallica and how she would describe Tasktop in one sentence. How do you start your day before work? I really would love to...

Reflections from DevOps Enterprise Summit 2019 + Day Three Recap

It’s been just over a week since this year’s DevOps Enterprise Summit 2019 in Las Vegas came to a close. And while we’re happy to be away from the artificial air that’s continuously pumped out at The Cosmopolitan, we will miss the breath of fresh air that many attendees and speakers brought to the DevOps...

Knowledge is power – how your QA/test teams can help you accelerate your value delivery 

As the digital demands of the business continue to escalate, software delivery teams are under extraordinary pressure to deliver more work faster. Speed, however, counts for little if these teams are not delivering a high-quality product of value; rapid turnaround for a customer request is futile if the feature doesn’t work properly or meet their...

Cultural breakthrough: 5 change management tips to support your digital transformation

Digital transformations typically demand major shifts in thinking, processes and behavior across the organization. It’s rarely, if ever, easy – especially when it comes to scaling and sustaining the transformation. Inevitably there will be a cultural shift, especially when you consider all the moving parts: the software delivery teams, the product owners, the multiple business...

The Flow Framework™ – Treating risk items as a security cost

In the Flow Framework™ there are four flow items that provide value to the end-user of your product: Features (new business value) Defects (quality) Technical debt (removal of impediments to future delivery) Risk (security, governance, compliance) A software organization must devote time to each flow item as they are all crucial to a strong product....

How to drive customer obsessed Product Development

At Tasktop our Product, Engineering and UX teams operate under a single umbrella called ‘Product Development’ to make all our value streams “customer-obsessed”. Our teams do not work in silos or a single project, rather they are focused on optimizing the value stream for a single product – such as Tasktop Integration Hub – to...