Leading the conversation on digital connected work
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.
René Te-Strote is a project lead at BMW Central IT. He’s been with the company for 17 years and heavily involved in its agile transformation, which was driven by titanic shifts in the automotive industry. “Today vehicles are packed with software. Hundreds of millions of lines of code are running in cars and in the...
January 17, 2007: Dr. Mik Kersten, Dr. Gail Murphy and Robert Elves founded Tasktop. Here is the announcement about the founding of the company a couple months after the incorporation https://blog.tasktop.com/tasktop-technologies-launched/. Just to put it in context, here are some other highlights from 2007: Apple iPhone was announced and launched Beyonce’s “Irreplaceable” was the best-performing...
Value stream management is a growing practice in software delivery organizations of large scale enterprises and government agencies. Flow Metrics are a major pillar of how we measure improvement in value streams. As organizations begin to adopt Flow Metrics, our natural tendencies emerge to massage the newfound visibility to make the metrics “look good”. This...
Listening to conferences, webinars and podcasts, it’s easy to find organizations that have made significant wins on the project to product journey. It’s also easy to gloss over the significant challenges that were overcome along the journey when you’ve only got 45 minutes to tell a story that took two+ years to unfold. The journey...
Often organizations can be overwhelmed when thinking about continuous improvement primarily because it’s just that … continuous. It’s easy to lose focus and momentum while on this journey because the day to day effort doesn’t bring about incredible change. This is even more true the longer the journey goes. A key to keeping momentum is...
Early on in a project to product journey, people often feel compelled to “do it right”, which leaves them stalled on the start line. It’s impossible to imagine any organization getting it “right” the first time. I strongly encourage you to consider the improvements you make to be “experiments” with a hypothesis that you can...
In my last blog, I emphasized how a compelling reason to change is a fundamental precondition for starting a project to product journey. In this blog, I take that a step further and discuss three key characteristics that your organization should create as they take their first steps. Start small It’s critical to generate early...
Functioning in silos instead of cross-functional value streams, funding scope/projects instead of capacity, leadership collecting metrics on utilization instead of value delivered – many organizations are realizing that their current ways of organizing aren’t enough to stay competitive in a rapidly changing world. While they know they need to change, there’s not a lot of...
There are many ways to assess the perceived viability or potential effectiveness of a proposed experiment. Teams can determine the options to improve flow, but it may not be clear what aspects of their work to address. While it’s best to start and get feedback as quickly as possible, a lightweight test may shine a...
As a founding member of the Value Stream Management Consortium (VSMC), Tasktop is always seeking to support the industry and the growth of Value Stream Management (VSM) in as many ways as we can. We believe that VSM is critical for companies to not just survive but thrive in the Age of Software. After publishing...
