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Celebrating Women in Technology: The Betty Knight ConnectALL Technology Scholarship Takes Its Second Stride

In ConnectALL, Tech Talk, Value Stream Management by Soumya Menon

For every woman that made the history books, there were many others who simply made history. One of these was Elizabeth “Betty” Amelia Roller Knight. ConnectALL continues to commemorate all the women in technology by funding a scholarship to the University of North Georgia (UNG) in honor of technology pioneer Betty Knight.

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Best Value Stream Management Tool: What Is ConnectALL’s Secret Sauce?

In Business Value, ConnectALL, Value Stream Management by Soumya Menon

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” — Peter Druker, the management guru who thought about Agile even before it existed. This is the simple principle that has driven a value stream management (VSM) company to build an army of Agile workforce and create solutions that enable software development companies to remove waste and become more predictable. As in the words of its President & COO Lance Knight, “You see waste, eliminate it. But, first, you need visibility. And ConnectALL will enable you to do just that.” ConnectALL, a value stream …

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Control the Flow in Your Software Delivery Value Stream Like Never Before: Introducing Logic Flow Adapters and Other Advanced Automation Capabilities in ConnectALL v2.11

In Business Value, ConnectALL, Product Updates, Value Stream Management by Soumya Menon

In a rapidly changing, chaotic, and unpredictable software world, the need is to empower humans to visualize and control a business’s flow from customer requests to customer usage. Leading companies are becoming predictable by implementing value stream management (VSM) and according to a leading analyst firm, 93% of companies will adopt or expand their value stream management use by 2024. With companies adopting VSM as a means to improve flow across their software delivery value stream, visibility needs to be simplified rather than complicated. To meet this challenge and empower users like never before, ConnectALL, the value stream management company, …

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How to Tackle the Context Switch Conundrum in Software Delivery

In Agile, ConnectALL, Value Stream Automation, Value Stream Management by Lance Knight

85 years ago, the world seemed a much simpler place. If we were to ask our old friend Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, the top three things to worry about were lions, tigers, and bears. Oh my! Today things are more complicated. When we are trying to stay focused and get our work done, there’s no peace. Notifications are dinging, apps are pinging, and our phone’s ringtones are singing. The things we worry about today include Zoom, Slack, and LinkedIn. Oh my! I think anyone who works at a computer recognizes that this is a common experience. But how …

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Improving Your Team’s Performance Begins with Understanding Everyone Else’s Metrics

In ConnectALL, Value Stream Management, Value Stream Metrics by Soumya Menon

What are your most critical metrics for your job? What is your performance evaluated upon? These you know because they’re most likely tied to your performance evaluation, perhaps they’re tied to a bonus or merit increase. Now think about your colleagues in other departments. What are the most important metrics for them and how they’re being evaluated? Are your goals and metrics aligned? Are they competing?  Like most people, you probably haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about those questions, after all, you have a job to do and that can be overwhelming in and of itself. However, since …

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Recession or No Recession? Or Are We Already in One? How to Better Prepare for Both

In Business Innovation, Business Value, ConnectALL, Value Stream Management by Soumya Menon

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times…or in our case, what kind of times are we in? I just had two completely different phone calls this morning. One was with a highly qualified prospect and the other was with a client up for renewal. Both companies are in the U.S., operate in the same vertical and size of $500M – $1B, and have the same pain points of siloed teams, disparate tools, and unknown bottlenecks. But when it came to their approach about how to handle the economic uncertainties we are all in, they had …

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Why Should Software Development and Delivery Teams Care About OKRs and VSM?

In ConnectALL, OKR, Value Stream Management by Soumya Menon

Should software development teams bother about Objectives and Key Results (OKR), or is it just a fancy term for another performance evaluation metric?  Let’s clear this right away: the OKR approach is not task or to-do checklists, or performance evaluations; it is not the same as software development KPIs or MBOs, and it definitely is not a project management target.  Despite the perception that executives are the only ones who should worry about OKRs, a well-planned and strategically written OKR — when tied to business outcomes — will have an impact on software development teams. Why? Because an OKR approach …

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How VSM Can Help You Steer Clear of These Six OKR Mistakes

In ConnectALL, OKR, Value Stream Management by Soumya Menon

In 2020, when a majority of the workforce switched to remote working, organizations of all sizes across the globe turned to Objective Key Results (OKR) to figure out how to stay aligned while responding to rapid change in the business environment.  OKRs, as you may know already, are a great way to attain audacious goals. This is because setting OKRs forces individuals, teams, and companies to articulate their goals in a time-bound and measurable fashion. By setting an Objective (a broad mission statement) and several Key Results (shorter, measurable assignments) great strides can be made in a quick and organized …