Today’s announcement of the Value Stream Management Consortium (VSMC) is an exciting and significant milestone in the evolution of software delivery. The VSMC is being launched to help organizations improve performance and drive customer value through the adoption of value stream management (VSM). We are extremely excited about our position as a co-founder, along with fellow industry leaders Digital.ai, HCL Software, ServiceNow, and Tasktop.

While the VSM industry is booming, it’s still in its infancy, and we know that great things aren’t built alone. …

A key performance indicator (KPI) measures how effective a company’s efforts are at improving their chances of attaining targeted goals. Every time a new target is set, it’s wise and customary to set trackers that monitor if you’re getting closer to the target over time. It’s possible to set and monitor KPIs across any company’s organizational chart, including software companies. This post highlights a few KPI examples across the sales, marketing, digital transformation, and software delivery departments.

Before we dive into the specific KPIs, let’s quickly acknowledge that measuring KPIs across crucial areas of a business adds to its overall…

If you’re involved in business intelligence, business analytics, or project management, you’ve probably heard terms like KPIs and metrics thrown around the office. In fact, if you come from outside these domains, you’ve probably also heard that “a project is meeting certain KPIs” or that “somebody’s looking at the metrics.”

But what does it all mean? Are the terms as interchangeable as they seem?

The short answer is that they’re similar, but not the same. A KPI, or key performance indicator, is a special type of metric. …

Plutora Blog — Agile Release Management, DevOps, Software Development, Value Stream Management Reading time 15 minutes

Technical debt is an incredibly useful metaphor in software engineering. It can encourage meaningful conversations about the trade-offs and hard choices that are part of the daily routine of software development teams and organizations. Those conversations can then lead organizations to make smarter decisions on how to allocate their resources and prioritize their various activities. Unfortunately, due to misconceptions and conflicting definitions, the term “technical debt” has become quite loaded. Different people might mean diametrically different things when they say “tech debt,” which reduces…

With technologies and businesses evolving at the speed of light, we’re witnessing a new era of business transformation. New technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are now more available than ever to small businesses. This allows them to become increasingly competitive with larger companies.

However, simply incorporating new technologies won’t give you a major competitive edge. Instead, the new point of focus is customer obsession or customer centricity. Customer-centric companies try to increase their ROI by improving the customer experience (CX). Providing an excellent customer experience turns new customers into loyal customers. …

Business intelligence is one of those domains that have a slightly different definition depending on who you talk to. End users might think about the reports and interfaces they see and work with. Creators will probably think of the processing steps that transform complex business data into information. And management often considers it as a method for improving efficiency, productivity, and decision-making.

All three viewpoints are correct from the perspective of each stakeholder. However, they don’t quite get to the core of business intelligence.

The core of business intelligence is typically something that’s in the realm of IT leadership. That’s…

Have you heard of canary deployments? Also called canary release, canary deployment is an important risk mitigation technique for software releases. Canary deployments allow software organizations not only to limit the damage caused by the release of a faulty software update but also to roll back that update quickly and easily. If your organization isn’t reaping the benefits of canary deployments, you should start ASAP. Canary deployments are essential for ensuring an organization’s ability to deploy high-quality software quickly and consistently. In the hyper-competitive world we live in, speed matters more than ever.

But I bet you have more questions…

The whole world is depending on IT today. Even non-IT industries like medicine, defense, and transportation are relying on IT to make their operations and tasks better, and the deliveries of their requirements happen as projects. Preserving the faith that the world has in IT is important. Hence, IT projects and their end products should be top-notch. To make sure this happens, IT projects should be properly overseen and managed through IT project management. This blog post is an introduction to the IT project management field. …