devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: Tasktop

  • Planview Outlines VSM Strategy After Acquiring Tasktop

    Planview Outlines VSM Strategy After Acquiring Tasktop

    Planview this week announced it completed its acquisition of Tasktop, a provider of a value stream management (VSM) platform that enables DevOps teams to align their efforts more closely with strategic business goals.

    Louise Allen, chief product officer for Planview, said the goal is to tighten integration between the Tasktop VSM platform and the project management applications that Planview already provides to software development teams and business executives.

    It’s still early days as far as adoption of VSM within DevOps workflows is concerned, but as more organizations realize how dependent they are on software, they need to better align application development projects with their strategic business goals, said Allen. VSM platforms make it possible to analyze data collected from various DevOps tools and enable business and IT leaders to, for example, visualize how a delay to one project might impact revenue goals for an upcoming quarter.

    Given the current weakness in the overall economy, organizations are looking to more precisely understand the impact software development decisions will have on the business, she added. As part of an effort to address that requirement, Planview will also make it easier for its applications to consume data that was originally created in Tasktop, she explained.

    VSM enables more organizations to function like a software company—aligning application updates with revenue goals. As the number of digital business transformation initiatives being launched increases, organizations are finding they need to operate more like a software company that either manufactures something or provides a service.

    The concept of value stream management traces its lineage back to lean manufacturing methods, which called for each step of a manufacturing process to be continuously measured. As software development has evolved from being a craft to an automated process using DevOps best practices, there is growing appreciation for the value of monitoring things such as the impact of missed software development deadlines on the business.

    At its core, a VSM platform will automatically convert metrics collected from a DevOps workflow to track a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) defined by the business. Once those metrics are gathered and KPIs established, organizations are then able to apply advanced analytics to align the resources needed to achieve a strategic goal by, for example, devoting more developers to a specific project. The data collected via a VSM platform can also then be shared with business intelligence (BI) applications that business leaders typically use to manage the business.

    It’s not clear just how hard business leaders are looking for deeper insights into how software development initiatives are progressing, but at the very least, DevOps leaders need a simpler way to understand all the dependencies that exist between initiatives. Otherwise, they risk missing deadlines simply because no one realized a delay that occurred in one project had a cascading impact across multiple other initiatives. Regardless of who consumes the data generated by a VSM platform, the need to increase visibility across the software development life cycle had never been greater.

  • Tasktop Joins Forces with Broadcom to Connect Data for Value Stream Management

    Broadcom ValueOps Connectors Powered by Tasktop Unites Data and Eliminates Silos, Helping Organizations Better Measure Business Value During Software Development

    VANCOUVER, BC., Mar 8, 2022 — Tasktop, the leading value stream management (VSM) insights provider, today announced a collaboration with Broadcom® to provide the technology that powers Broadcom’s ValueOps Connectors, a solution that delivers bidirectional synchronization of data between Broadcom’s ValueOps Value Stream Management Solution and the software development tools used by data-driven enterprises. This solution has been adopted by dozens of shared Broadcom and Tasktop customers.

    Despite the investments businesses make on Agile and DevOps, most enterprises are still not adequately responsive or adaptive—according to Forrester® only 16% can release more than once a month. Tasktop’s VSM platform helps businesses bridge the gap between software delivery and business outcomes by breaking down the silos, identifying and removing bottlenecks, eliminating waste, and accelerating software delivery.

    Additionally, data used to make business decisions is often unreliable, hard to find, and stuck in silos. Broadcom’s ValueOps Connectors, powered by Tasktop, gives enterprises the ability to collect and unify data across values streams; remove data from silos throughout the enterprise to create complete data sets across all tools and teams; increase collaboration between teams that are using different tools in distributed environments; and eliminate errors related to manual data collection.

    “Every business is a software business and accessible, reliable data is needed to derive value during the software delivery process. This requires solutions to connect technology and the business with the right metrics to enable more effective enterprise digital transformation,” said Dr. Mik Kersten, CEO at Tasktop. “Broadcom’s ValueOps Connectors powered by Tasktop help uncover data lost in silos, the key to unlocking all information needed for effective value stream management.”

    “Data in isolation does not tell the full picture. Eliminating data silos is the first step towards making informed business decisions to better align product development and support overall business strategy,” said Jean-Louis Vignaud, Head of ValueOps Product Group. “Our leading VSM solution leverages these ValueOps Connectors to bring data together to reveal new stories and power value streams.”

    To learn more about ValueOps Connectors, visit broadcom.com/valueops-connectors

    About Tasktop

    Tasktop’s value stream management platform enables enterprises to master software at scale. Leading brands, including half of the Fortune 100, use Tasktop to provide real-time visibility into the health of product value streams, allowing them to make better decisions and align with business goals. Tasktop connects with existing tools and overlays the end-to-end value stream to provide the abstractions, automations, visualizations and forensics needed to practice value stream management on a daily basis. Learn more about Tasktop at tasktop.com and follow us on Twitter @tasktop.

  • Tasktop Adds Dashboard to Surface VSM Insights

    Tasktop Adds Dashboard to Surface VSM Insights

    Tasktop today unveiled a dashboard that it promises will simplify tracking of key performance indicators (KPIs) spanning multiple projects.

    In addition, the value stream management (VSM) platform provider revealed it has garnered an additional $100 million in funding.

    Tasktop CEO Mik Kersten said the Tasktop Viz VSM Portfolio Insights dashboard makes it simpler to surface the insights that the company’s VSM platform aggregates as it collects metrics and analytic data from the tools and platforms that make up a DevOps workflow.

    Organizations are then better able to determine the impact any change to the rate at which an application is being developed will have on the business, noted Kersten. IT and business leaders can also more easily identify how constrained resources or persistent quality control issues might be adversely impacting those business goals, added Kersten.

    As a DevOps discipline, VSM is still relatively new. However, Tasktop claims more than half of the Fortune 100 employ its VSM platform. Customers include BMW, CGI, E*Trade and T-Mobile. Despite the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, the company reports it saw a 30% increase in revenues driven mainly by organizations that have accelerated multiple digital business transformation initiatives. A recent Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact Study indicated organizations realize a potential 640% return on investment over a three period after implementing the Tasktop VSM platform.

    Tasktop is also a founding member of the Value Stream Management Consortium, which is seeking to promote adoption of VSM platforms to close the divide that often exists between individual DevOps projects and the strategic business goals of an organization.

    The concept of value stream management traces its lineage back to lean manufacturing methods, which called for each step of a manufacturing process to be continuously measured. As software development has evolved from being a craft to a process that is automated as much as possible using DevOps best practices, the need to monitor the impact of, for example, missed software development deadlines on the business has become more acute as organizations appreciate just how dependent they are on software.

    VSM platforms automatically take technical metrics, gathered via a DevOps process, and match them to a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) defined by business leaders. The challenge many organizations still face is, first, making sure they have the tools in place to collect the appropriate technical metrics and then identifying the KPIs that truly matter to the business. Once those metrics are gathered and KPIs established, organizations are able to apply advanced analytics to optimize allocation of resources that include people, platforms and processes, noted Kersten.

    It may be a while before VSM becomes pervasively applied with organizations. However, those organizations that find a way to consistently deliver quality applications, on time, that have a greater impact on the business will inevitably start to outperform rivals. The challenge and the opportunity is to bring a level of discipline to bear that ensures that goal is always achieved.

  • Tasktop Enhances Tasktop Viz™ with New Data Analytics and Automation Features

    Bridging the optimization gap between software teams and business leadership with real-time visibility and data analytics across end-to-end value streams

    VANCOUVER, BC., December 9, 2020 – Tasktop, the value stream management company creating the universal integration and visualization standard for value stream management, today announced significant enhancements for Tasktop Viz™, the company’s solution for connecting software delivery to business outcomes. This new set of data analytics features provide instant results through real-time, data-driven metrics, as well as on-demand expert advice for anyone within a large organization to make informed decisions and deliver desired business outcomes.

    “Tasktop customers are benefiting from our 14 years of expertise in aligning software development and business through innovation,” said Nicole Bryan, Chief Product Officer at Tasktop. “We are dedicated to delivering the best-in-class solution for helping traditional companies deliver software with the speed and efficiency of digital natives, providing value to their customers even as tools and workflows evolve. Tasktop Viz was specifically designed to give our customers actionable visibility into complex workflows with minimal effort, and these new features further strengthen our offering.”

    What’s new in Tasktop Viz:

    • Leading Indicator Analytics: This feature displays directly on the platform’s dashboard, alerting business leaders to problems impacting the speed and productivity of the company’s value streams. There are three key areas that are tracked:

      • Neglected Work in Progress (WIP) helps preserve customer’s trust by alerting business leaders when only a small fraction of committed work is progressing to completion

      • Predicted Flow Time Increase alerts and informs business leaders’ work intake strategy in cases when time-to-market is predicted to increase

      • Months to Complete WIP accurately projects how long existing commitments will take to complete and discourages leaders from extending beyond the value stream’s current capacity

    • Embedded Flow Advisory: Dashboards now include on-demand tutorials and access to advisory from top-notch VSM experts. The embedded flow advisory allows value streams to take action based on the data and remove constraints impeding business value delivery.

    • Smart Model Application: This new automation feature utilizes real-time pattern matching to instantly map hundreds of native artifact statuses to the standardized value stream Flow States that feed into Flow Metrics.

    • Product Portfolio Structures: Similar to planning and reporting tools, this new feature reflects the way portfolios and organizations are structured, so business leaders can view products within their context, navigate to them logically and group them for easy executive visibility.

    “Enterprise agility can be hard to achieve: old habits die hard, even under the glossy new surface of agile operating procedures and cadences, but that can be hard to see and catch,” says Tasktop CEO Dr. Mik Kersten. “Tasktop Viz holds up a mirror to product value streams, making it possible to observe and measure the mechanics for delivering a product to market.”

    Tasktop Viz launched in March 2020 to enable traditional businesses to transform into high-performing tech companies by instantly providing an outside lens for accelerating software delivery.

    For more information about Tasktop Viz, visit www.tasktop.com/viz.

    About Tasktop:

    Tasktop’s value stream management platform enables enterprises to master software at scale. Leading brands, including half of the Fortune 100, use Tasktop to provide real-time visibility into the health of product value streams, allowing them to make better decisions and align with business goals. Tasktop plugs into existing tools and overlays the end-to-end value stream to provide the abstractions, automations, visualizations and forensics needed to practice value stream management on a daily basis.

    For more information, visit us https://www.tasktop.com/.

  • Latest Tasktop Release Supports Jira Align

    Measure and Automate Flow across Silos, from Business Ideas in Jira Align through Technology Implementation

    VANCOUVER, BC, July 23, 2020 – Tasktop, a company leading the creation and definition of value stream management (VSM) solutions, today announced that its latest release of the Tasktop Value Stream Management platform supports Jira Align. With this new Jira Align connector, organizations are able to automate and measure the flow of work between Jira Align and other work management, design, testing, release, ITSM and CRM tools, connecting business ideas to their technology implementation.

    The Jira Align connector expands Tasktop’s comprehensive connector infrastructure and technology, known as the Flow Fabric™, which supports full fidelity and real-time connectivity to more than 60 Agile, DevOps and IT tools.

    Jira Align is an enterprise agile planning tool, increasingly popular in large enterprises for strategic planning. Ideas that start in Jira Align are executed in work management tools like Jira, Azure DevOps and Rally; tested in tools like Tosca, qTest, ALM and SmartBear; and supported in ITSM tools like Jira Service Desk, ServiceNow and Remedy. Connecting the toolchain through a pure-play VSM platform rapidly improves flow and visibility from the originating idea through its development, release and subsequent feedback loops.

    Automating Cross-Silo Flow with Tasktop Hub

    Tasktop’s Jira Align connector offers enterprises several unique advantages and extends Tasktop Hub’s reliability, sophistication and scalability to the world of Jira Align, tightly integrating it with the rest of the value stream and more than 60 tools.

    Tasktop Hub offers practitioners that work in Jira Align or rely on data from Jira Align the following benefits:

    • Reliable and seamless bi-directional synchronization of Themes, Epics, Capabilities, Features, Stories and more, eliminating friction and delays
    • Routing of feature work to the right team in the right tool based on its program or any other feature fields, and using filters to determine what’s eligible to flow
    • Elegant merging of several acceptance criteria from Jira Align into a single, rich text format field in a targeted tool, like Jira or Tosca
    • Embedding back-references (links) to twinned Jira Align artifacts to automate traceability and facilitate communication across silos
    • Easy error resolution with robust monitoring, troubleshooting and retry mechanisms

    An example of how Tasktop Hub can integrate Jira Align with Salesforce, Jira, Rally and Tosca to create end-to-end flow from the original business idea until its release can be seen here.

    According to Atlassian’s Steve Elliot, head of product for Jira Align, “The depth and breadth of Tasktop’s integration capabilities can help improve the speed, velocity and quality of software delivery. By integrating data from the end-to-end value stream alongside enterprise agile planning to include work done in testing, design and support tools, Jira Align users have better oversight and visibility into the execution of the vision laid out in Jira Align.”

    Flow Metrics for the End-To End Value Stream

    Jira Align is also supported by Tasktop Viz™, to provide enterprises with insight into the flow of business value, starting from strategic planning in Jira Align and all through the implementation by individual value streams working in other tools.

    Tasktop Viz finds bottlenecks in end-to-end flow, answering questions like: How fast can business ideas become reality? Where is work slowing down? What is the business case for investments that can shorten time-to-market and increase velocity?

    “This new integration provides more visibility into flow and optimization opportunities at the early stages of idea elaboration and planning,” said Nicole Bryan, chief product officer at Tasktop. “Flow metrics and diagnostics on the work done in Jira Align and its subsequent breakdown in other tools can help shine a light on activity at the top of the funnel and help organizations progress their shift from project to product.”

    About Tasktop

    Tasktop’s value stream management platform enables enterprises to master software at scale. Leading brands, including half of the Fortune 100, use Tasktop to provide real-time visibility into the health of product value streams, allowing them to make better decisions and align with business goals. Tasktop plugs into existing tools and overlays the end-to-end value stream to provide the abstractions, automations, visualizations and forensics needed to practice value stream management on a daily basis.

  • Tasktop Delivers Viz Value Stream Management App

    Tasktop Delivers Viz Value Stream Management App

    Tasktop this week announced the general availability of an application to manage projects based on a flow framework that captures events as they occur across the software development toolchain.

    Company CEO Mik Kersten said Tasktop Viz is the first substantiation of the flow framework in software that provides a value stream management application to enable organizations to more effectively manage software development projects. Tasktop Viz doesn’t necessarily replace project management software as a system of record for billing purposes, for example, said Kersten; however, it does provide a way to visually model the software development environment in a way that makes it easier to identify bottlenecks and potential opportunities to reallocate resources.

    Kersten said from a management perspective, existing approaches to managing software development projects are broken. They depend too much on software developers to manually enter data to update a project management application, which they don’t do as often as they should because it takes time away from developing software, he said. Tasktop Viz takes advantage of application programming interfaces (APIs) to automatically capture metadata from across the software development toolchain, providing instant visibility into software development projects without requiring DevOps teams to engage in an additional coding, Kersten noted.

    Tasktop Viz

    Kersten has been making a case for the adoption of an approach to managing software development projects based on the flow framework for several years. Tasktop Viz now provides IT teams with an application that is designed from the ground up using that model.

    Of course, the concept of value stream management applications has been around for some time. The debate now is not so much over the value of these applications as much as it is which architectural approach to building these applications best reflects modern software development. As the number of dependencies between projects continues to expand, it’s becoming next to impossible for organizations to manage multiple software development projects relying solely on spreadsheets and existing project management applications.

    That issue is further exacerbated by the fact that businesses are now more dependent on software than ever, so any delay to a project could have a dramatic impact on future revenues.

    Kersten said that despite the obvious business benefits, the biggest obstacle to adoption is more psychological than technical. Many software development teams are reluctant to adopt tools that might illustrate how chaotic the software development process within their organization really is. It’s critical that organizations that adopt value stream management applications do so with an eye toward wanting organizations to improve rather than just deploying another tool to measure metrics that are used to increase the amount of code being written.

    Of course, there’s no correlation between the amount of code being written and the quality of the applications being developed. The real challenge is to not just accelerate the rate at which applications are being developed, but also to ensure that once those applications are deployed in a production environment the number of fixes required are kept to the absolute minimum possible.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Tasktop Announces General Availability of Tasktop Viz to Guide Successful Transition From Project to Product

    VANCOUVER, BC, March 11, 2020, Tasktop, the leader in value stream management, today announced the general availability of Tasktop Viz, its value stream management solution for organizations attempting to thrive in the Age of Software as they move from project to product. This latest offering implements the Flow Framework™, Tasktop’s unique and prescriptive solution for connecting Agile and DevOps to the business, created by Tasktop founder Dr. Mik Kersten.

     

    Tasktop Viz guides IT organizations’ successful transition from project to product regardless of where they are in that transition, by providing real-time visibility into the health of product value streams and actionable insights into the obstacles impeding business value delivery. For each product value stream, it crunches the objective data captured from IT’s integrated toolchain – across teams, tools and departments – and generates Flow Metrics dashboards that pinpoint where work is slowing down and impacting time-to-market.

     

    Key benefits of Tasktop Viz include:

    • Uncovers the impediments to speed the end-to-end delivery process and applies targeted automation to measurably increase flow.
    • Identifies where to spend innovation and digital transformation budgets to achieve desired business results and provides a measurement framework for tracking progress.
    • Creates visibility into IT performance through the business lens — namely by measuring product value stream flow in terms of value realization and strategic objectives.
    • Provides a turnkey way of measuring software delivery and the progress of transformations.

     

    “Software has eaten the world, and for even the most traditional companies in industries such as automotive, manufacturing and finance, their fortunes will be determined by their ability to deliver customer value via software effectively and efficiently,” said Neelan Choksi, president and COO, Tasktop.  “We are thrilled to provide Tasktop Viz to organizations desperately attempting to master software at scale. Our initial customers have been raving about how the Flow Metrics are changing the conversation between IT and business. The dashboards in Tasktop Viz are making their way into the boardroom to provide visibility on the progress of digital transformations and to help justify major decisions around outsourcing and shifting budgets for IT. The general availability of Tasktop Viz means that Tasktop will be able to share these benefits of the Flow Framework to the entire market trying to compete in the Age of Software.”

     

    The new solution is unique in three ways:

    • It is the only turnkey solution to support the transition from project to product and sustain a product-oriented IT organization. In fact, through Tasktop’s no-code do-it-yourself modeling, business owners and tech managers can create actionable, product-specific dashboards in just a few clicks and get value from day one.
    • It provides instant out-of-the-box visibility into integrated data from across product delivery organizations (from ideation through operation) in a scalable way.
    • It is the first and only purpose-built solution to implement the Flow Framework for value stream management of software delivery. The Flow Framework helps IT leadership of traditional businesses manage their organizations like the big tech companies.

     

    “Cubic has a long and successful history of driving innovation and technology leadership in the military and public sectors,” said Jim Colson, vice president and chief technology officer, Cubic Corporation. “We recently began integration and deployment of Tasktop and the Flow Framework as part of Cubic’s 2025 Strategic Initiatives around Engineering Excellence. Early results show that complementing our Agile, SAFe and DevOps methodologies with Tasktop Viz empowers our business and technology leaders with real-time insights into our value streams, enhancing our ability to deliver targeted business agility across our technology portfolio, regardless of the toolchains that underpin the work.”

     

    ”IT and the business see the world through two different lenses,” said Jason Zubrick, CTO of a delivery service company. “Having used Tasktop Viz, the translation between IT work streams and business outcomes became increasingly clearer. The tool provides amazing visibility into the impacts of strategy and prioritization decisions based on efficiency and velocity. I love that. And, it helped me refine with confidence because I could change aspects of my product value stream—like team size, story size, point commitments—and see the results quickly.”

     

    Resources

    • Webinar: Accelerating Innovation at T-Mobile. March 18, 2020, 2 p.m. EDT: 5G & Beyond: Accelerating Innovation at T-Mobile with the Flow Framework.  Join T-Mobile SVP, Technology, Bryan Fleming and Tasktop CEO Dr. Mik Kersten on how T-Mobile is using Tasktop Viz to change the way it builds to innovate and reduce time to market.
    • Webinar: Viz product. March 26, 2020, 1 p.m. EDT:  Shifting from Project to Product with Tasktop Viz. Co-hosts Nicole Bryan, VP Product Development, and Naomi Lurie, Sr. director of Product Marketing, will share real-life stories from enterprises using Tasktop Viz to make the shift to product. They’ll also share best practices on how to get started and literally get insights within days.
    • Webinar: Flow Framework. March 13, 10 a.m. EDT; March 27, 12 p.m. EDT. Flow Framework Information Session. Learn more about Tasktop’s Flow Framework as an implementation approach for organizing around and optimizing the software delivery value stream in this one-hour session. Find out how to visualize product value streams, identify what value units flow in the value stream and understand Flow Metrics and how they correlate to business results.

     

    About Tasktop

    Tasktop is the leader in value stream integration and visualization. It catalyzes the shift from Project to Product for global enterprises and governments, enabling them to innovate and thrive in the Age of Software. Its software development offerings leverage the Flow Framework™ to create customer-centric value streams and measure end-to-end business outcomes. Unlike data lakes and custom reporting solutions, Tasktop’s Flow Modeling ensures correct, scalable and turnkey Flow Metrics. And unlike Agile or IT tool vendors, Tasktop’s Flow Fabric enables end-to-end visibility across all leading vendor tools, maximizing investments in tool platforms, enabling the best-of-breed and future proofing tool chains.

     

  • Tasktop Announces More Than 23,000 Copies of Dr. Mik Kersten’s Best-Selling Project to Product Book Sold in First Year

    Founder & CEO’s Book Defines the Roadmap for Digital Transformation

     

    VANCOUVER, BC, Nov. 20, 2019 — Tasktop, the leader in Value Stream Integration and Management, today provided first-year sales figures for Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework, the best-selling book by Tasktop Founder & CEO Dr. Mik Kersten.

    Kersten has become the global authority on helping enterprise organizations transition from project management to product-oriented software innovation. His book introduces the Flow Framework™ as a new way of building an infrastructure for innovation to change the way enterprises approach software delivery. Based on his work with Fortune 100 enterprises, he provides a new managerial approach to help organizations better understand the human and system dynamics that underpin their IT infrastructure.

    The book has sold 23,000 copies in the past year and remains on Amazon’s Top 10 Information Management bestseller list.

    Kersten, along with other employees of Tasktop, has delivered presentations about concepts in Project to Product at more than 56 events worldwide within the past year. All author proceeds from the book go to supporting non-profit programs focused on diversity, women, and minorities in technology.

    Reflecting on the past year, Kersten said, “I have been amazed by the reception of Project to Product. Working with IT Revolution Press, we set a goal of ten thousand lifetime copies of the book, and more than doubled that in the first year. This speaks to the urgency and the need for enterprise organizations to get their digital transformations on track and become software innovators before it is too late. I am thrilled that my experience in the trenches and the Flow Framework are arming so many technology leaders with new tools to fight and win on the battleground of digital disruption.”

    Anna Noak, editorial director, Publishing at IT Revolution Press, LLC added, “IT Revolution acquired Project to Product because it is a game-changing book and, as a publisher who strives to get cutting edge content to our readers, we knew that this book would become a must-read for those who are on the front lines of the Digital Revolution. We are incredibly proud to have this book in our list and are pleased to be a part of getting it into the hands of readers.”

    More information about upcoming presentations can be viewed here, as well as how to request Dr. Kersten as a keynote at a conference or internal corporate event here. To download an excerpt from Project to Product, click here.

    About Tasktop

    Tasktop — a leader in Value Stream Integration and Management — automates and visualizes the flow of product-critical information across the software delivery value stream, from initial customer request to delivery, and back through the customer feedback loop for continuous improvement. Tasktop Hub integrates 60 best-of-breed tools, breaking through silos such as business planning, development, support and operations, and turns those weeks of wait time into seconds. Tasktop Viz allows enterprise organizations to see where the bottlenecks are across thousands or tens of thousands of IT staff, and to remove those bottlenecks with Tasktop Hub. Together, the two tools provide the data-driven visibility and infrastructure needed to survive and thrive through a large-scale digital transformation. The backbone of the most impactful Agile and DevOps transformations worldwide, the company’s customers are the global leaders in financial services, insurance, government and manufacturing, many of whom are in the Fortune 100, including 11 of the world’s top banks, the top six health plans and four of the top 10 US insurance companies.

     

  • Tasktop Announces Limited Release of Tasktop Viz, Offering First-ever Way of Measuring Flow of Business Value in Software Delivery

    Las Vegas, Oct. 29, 2019 — Tasktop, the leader in Value Stream Integration, today announced here at the DevOps Enterprise Summit the limited availability of Tasktop Viz, the first purpose-built tool to implement the Flow Framework™.  It accomplishes this by using Tasktop’s connector technology to automatically extract the end-to-end tool data that underpins software delivery, and then translating that data into a common language that business leaders understand.

    All too often, technology delivery seems disconnected from business goals, despite extensive investments in digital transformations. CIOs and business stakeholders lack a common language to measure whether investments in innovation and emerging technologies are delivering business results and struggle to precisely identify the real source of inefficiencies. Viz provides the prescription for truly transforming the enterprise, equipping IT and business leaders with the information they need to succeed.

    “Adopting the Flow Framework means rising above the proxy metrics that lead so many transformations astray, and elevating the conversation to how software impacts revenue, cost of operation, customer retention, susceptibility to security breaches and the happiness and productivity of your staff,” said Dr. Mik Kersten, PhD, best-selling author of Project to Product,  creator of the Flow Framework, and co-founder and CEO of Tasktop. “Viz provides IT organizations with business-level dashboards to run their software portfolio at any scale, providing the most critical underpinning needed to steer a successful Agile and DevOps transformation.”

    Viz allows enterprise organizations to see where the bottlenecks are across thousands or tens of thousands of IT staff to provoke the right conversations and measure the journey to product-centric operations. It provides:

    • Prescriptive metrics, implementing the Flow Framework for the shift from project to product with data for each value stream: end to end, ideation to revenue.
    • A turnkey solution for rapid time to value with out of the box metrics dashboards for business users.
    • Instant, integrated visibility with the Flow Metrics from the end-to-end value stream.

    Viz spells the end of ETL and data lake dependencies; custom coding; data manipulation; and long lead times. Tasktop’s one-of-a-kind modeling instantly aligns, reconciles and abstracts cross-tool data into actionable measurements of flow. Customers can model each of their product value stream across a heterogeneous tools landscape, encompassing not only development to release, but inclusive of the ideation phases upstream and operation phases downstream, adding immediate value to the enterprise. All of this is accomplished without the need to code or change the workflow.

    A cloud-based solution that accommodates every tool, team and process, Viz requires no premature changes to existing org structures or technical infrastructure.

    “As software is eating the world, traditional enterprises and agencies are failing in their digital transformations as they struggle to compete,” said Neelan Choksi, president and COO of Tasktop. “With the introduction of Viz, we now provide these organizations with a powerful combination: Tasktop Viz shows them their bottlenecks and inefficiencies, and Tasktop Integration Hub helps remove those bottlenecks.  We are so excited to deliver the all-encompassing technology needed to meet Dr. Kersten’s groundbreaking vision of the future as detailed in Project to Product and his practical guide to get organizations to that future via the Flow Framework.”

    Tasktop Viz is available in limited release today. It will be available in general release in January 2020. More about Viz can be found at Dr. Kersten’s blog post here and in a video here.

    About Tasktop

    Tasktop — a leader in Value Stream Integration and Management — automates and visualizes the flow of product-critical information across the software delivery value stream, from initial customer request to delivery, and back through the customer feedback loop for continuous improvement. Tasktop Hub integrates 60 best-of-breed tools, breaking through silos such as business planning, development, support and operations, and turns those weeks of wait time into seconds. Tasktop Viz allows enterprise organizations to see where the bottlenecks are across thousands or tens of thousands of IT staff, and to remove those bottlenecks with Tasktop Hub. Together, the two tools provide the data-driven visibility and infrastructure needed to survive and thrive through a large-scale digital transformation. The backbone of the most impactful Agile and DevOps transformations worldwide, the company’s customers are the global leaders in financial services, insurance, government and manufacturing, many of whom are in the Fortune 100, including 11 of the world’s top banks, the top six health plans and four of the top 10 US insurance companies.

     

  • Jama Software Offers Cloud Edition of Tasktop Integration Hub Expands Partnership in Place Since 2014; Offers Customers Hosted Solution Benefits

    VANCOUVER, BC , Sept. 9, 2019 – Tasktop, the leader in Value Stream Integration, today announced that Jama Software is now offering the cloud version of its Tasktop Integration Hub for Jama Connect™ to automate and visualize the flow of product-critical information across the software delivery value stream.

    This expands the already successful partnership the two companies have had since 2014, providing hundreds of Jama Software customers with integration to third-party systems like Jira, Azure DevOps, Micro Focus ALM, Rally, qTest and many more. The cloud version of Hub for Jama Connect provides the automation and traceability advantages of Tasktop’s on-premises solution plus speed of deployment, reduced costs and the elimination of maintenance and upgrading efforts.

    Jama Connect enables engineering, software development and leadership teams to stay clear and current (in real-time) about their requirements and test plans throughout the project lifecycle. Through Hub, teams can integrate Jama Connect with their ALM, PLM, development and QA tools. Jama Connect requirements and test cases flow automatically and bi-directionally between tools, extending traceability, visibility and collaboration across the organization. It enables everyone to work in their tool of choice and gain access to updates other team members make in theirs. This eliminates manual re-keying of information, mistakes caused by old or incomplete information and interminable email threads and status meetings.

    “The successful partnership with Tasktop has allowed Jama Connect customers to enjoy Hub’s ease of use and unlock added value from our platform,” said Scott Roth, CEO, Jama Software. “The new cloud-integration option for Tasktop Hub helps more of our customers avoid dealing with infrastructure requisitions and maintenance costs. With this partnership, our customers can further realize the power of integrating Jama Connect with a variety of other leading product development tools like Jira.”

    “We’re thrilled that our cloud-based Hub offering is now available for all Jama Connect customers,” said Mik Kersten, CEO, Tasktop. “This expansion of our partnership opens up integration to more Jama Software customers, enabling them to connect all of their software delivery and operation tools to automate information flow. Thanks to this and the accelerated time-to-value for connecting value streams, the hosted edition of Tasktop Hub is already proving very popular with our joint customers.”

    About Jama

    Jama Software provides the leading platform for requirements, risk, and test management. With Jama Connect and industry-focused services, teams building complex products, systems and software improve cycle times, increase quality, reduce rework and minimize effort proving compliance. Representing the forefront of modern development, Jama’s growing customer base of more than 600 organizations includes SpaceX, Boston Scientific, Lyft, Deloitte, Alight, Samsung and Caterpillar.

    About Tasktop

    Tasktop, a leader in Value Stream Integration and Management, automates and visualizes the flow of product-critical information across the software delivery value stream — from initial customer request to delivery and back through the customer feedback loop for continuous improvement. Some 57 integrations with software delivery tools enable organizations to leverage a best-of-breed tool network that also provides end-to-end visibility and traceability. The backbone of the most impactful Agile and DevOps transformations worldwide, the company’s customers are the global leaders in financial services, insurance, government and manufacturing, many of whom are in the Fortune 100, including 11 of the top 25 banks in the world, the top six health plans and four of the top 10 US insurance companies. For more information about Tasktop, please visit: http://tasktop.com

    ###