Welcome to our first blog post of 2021! We wish you all lots of health and success in the new year. 2020 was unusual and turbulent, but there is one certain thing. We live in a new world that requires a new way of thinking if we want to thrive in it. Even though last […]
Do you know what sets successful managers apart? A lot actually, but one of their main traits is the ability to set the right goals, clearly communicate them, and eventually turn them into reality. That’s why a management tool such as OKRs is steadily gaining popularity over the past years. Putting it in practice, however, […]
It’s no secret that staying on top of impediments and issues is critical for any project’s success. That’s why traditional project managers aim to track all problems in detailed sheets or create logs with project risks so they can mitigate them. This approach makes perfect sense for stable projects with predominantly homogenous work. In a […]
I am here to tell you a story. A story of a team that was Agile at heart, tried Scrum as methodological support to materialize that agility and discovered in Kanban the best Scrum companion to face different challenges. No, it is not a story of a team doing Scrumban, but of a team choosing […]
When managing knowledge work projects, the word “dependency” is often associated with delay. Honestly, that comes as no surprise because the traditional way of managing dependencies (using Gantt Charts) is not reliable in an environment where requirements frequently change. Following the same old approach requires project managers to rework their initial plans often. In turn, […]
In Part I, we described our journey in Leading an Agile transformation for a complex hardware product development program in a highly regulated industry within a large multinational company. We didn’t consciously set out to implement ‘Agile’ or lead a scaled Agile transformation. We didn’t have a masterplan describing how we were going to deploy […]
Leading a large-scale Agile transformation is hard. It requires relentless focus and discipline to create an environment that empowers teams to deliver innovation at pace. There are thousands of publications describing how this should be done in theory, yet not so many on how to translate that theory into practice. The majority of those that […]
Kanban has long ago left the automotive industry and conquered the IT world, but now, with an increased focus on flow, it is about to expand its reach to the entire business. Many business leaders have realized that Kanban has an extremely flexible architecture that allows it to scale across the enterprise naturally and gently. […]
Virtually all companies use Key Performance Indicators (KPI) but too many are measuring the wrong things. The result is wasted effort and misdirection because choosing the wrong metrics rewards the wrong behaviors. U.S. banking giant Wells Fargo learned this the hard way. They incentivized associates based on a key metric: the number of accounts opened. […]
Managing projects is not an easy job. Having just one under your belt requires a lot of commitment to ensure its successful realization and delivery. However, the reality is that as project managers, we often have to manage multiple projects at once. In a traditional project environment, we would create detailed plans for them upfront […]