Tasktop Technologies Inc. today marked a major milestone in its efforts to validate its technology for tying software development to business outcomes.

The company announced a $100 million investment from Sumeru Equity Partners LP, a private equity firm that mostly invests in growth-oriented software, technology services and hardware companies. The infusion is more than triple the $29.5 million Tasktop has raised to date.

The company also debuted the Tasktop Viz Value Stream Management Portfolio Insights Dashboard, an analytics and visualization engine that it says can provide business executives with greater visibility into digital transformation initiatives.

Founded in 2007, Tasktop is considered one of the leading emerging vendors in the market for value stream management, which aligns software development to business value. Founder and CEO Mik Kersten (pictured) said the need has never been greater.

“A trillion dollars is going to waste in digital transformation projects because enterprises don’t have a way of measuring the value of software,” he said. “They  know how to measure cost and activities but not whether they’re delivering more value to the customer.”

Tasktop, which already boasts more than half of Fortune 100 as customers, says it can dramatically increase the speed of software development by providing metrics and dashboards that visualize and measure the value streams as well as choke points that frustrate software delivery.

Kersten, who has a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of British Columbia, created the framework and metrics based upon the principles of lean manufacturing, which seeks to reduce waste in the production process by focusing the organization on factors that deliver customer value.

“We’ve got a retail apocalypse because those companies failed to transform in any meaningful way,” he said. “Our goal is to stop that from happening to other companies by helping them understand restraints.”

Mythical man-month

Even agile methodologies such as DevOps focus too much on delivery metrics that show “you can be very good at deploying software but the flow time to the customer hasn’t changed at all,” Kersten said. Development managers are too beholden to the belief that adding resources to a project makes it go faster when experience long ago proved that the opposite is true, a principle known as the “mythical man-month.”

Tasktop’s objective is to “give CEOs and CIOs the right views across their development and lines of business to show where they have a problem, what is working, where to invest and how they are tracking against goals,” he said. “Previously this was done by teams reporting up with PowerPoints. We can show them exactly what’s productive and what’s problematic.” Tasktop integrates with more than 60 workflow, collaboration and service management tools to create that unified view.

The new Portfolio Insights Dashboard rolls up metrics and analytics generated at the individual product value stream level into a view that is meaningful to business executives. It’s intended to help business leaders identify processes that can be accelerated as well as under-capitalized projects and to set priorities for features that achieve measurable business goals. Users can see where high workloads are straining resource capacity and areas that are experiencing poor feature deliver or high defect rates.

The funding comes after what Tasktop said was greater than 50% growth in its most recent fiscal year and positive coverage by both by Forrester Research Inc. and by Knowingly Inc., which does business as GigaOm.

Equally important, Tasktop turned an unexpected profit last year in part thanks to a windfall from companies rushing to accelerate digital projects. “The goal was never to be profitable at this stage; the past year has made us profitable,” Kersten said.

The funding will be invested in product development and evangelizing the relatively new category of value stream management, which the CEO said Tasktop has the potential to lead. “We’re moving as quickly as we can to be the category killer,” Kersten said.

Kersten spoke with SiliconANGLE Media’s video studio theCUBE in October about the limitations of existing management frameworks in ensuring development teams work toward business objectives:

Photo: SiliconANGLE