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Is Your Agile Project Healthy?

Blog

Experienced agile coaches and practitioners develop a sixth-sense. They can quickly assess the health of an agile project or team just as doctors do with their patients. In 2013, Mike Cohn coined the term scrum smells to describe the signs that a scr...

Aug 4, 2019

Making Complex Decision

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“…when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.”  Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and SlowIn the midst of the pandemic, we have and will continue to face numerous complex decis...

Jul 1, 2020

Create Value: Map the Value Stream

Blog

“If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing.” W. Edwards DemingOur work and home lives our bounded by standard operating procedures and process—and too many of them stink.  We all have encountered Byzantin...

Jul 30, 2020

Confidentiality of Project Data When Shared in XER File Format

Blog

Clearly defined tasks and responsibilities must be given to all project participants, in order to ensure the successful completion of the project.Even more so when a project counts a large number of participants, which makes it more demanding and dif...

Jun 12, 2019

Disciplined Agile & SAFe

Blog

Disciplined Agile® (DA) and the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®) are two popular, second-generation agile methodologies.  They build on lean-agile thinking; and standard Scrum, Kanban, and DevOps practices. They offer practitioners tools to extend and ...

Dec 1, 2022

Taylorism: Then & Now

Blog

Frederick Winslow Taylor shaped the field of management science.  He believed systematic and scientific methods could be applied to managing operations and production.  His work inspired the formation of the Harvard Business School and the modern ass...

Jan 3, 2023

Unlock the Power of the Project Management Plan

Blog

The project management plan (Plan) is a powerful tool.  It describes how the project will be executed. It should be tailored based on the project’s context and needs.  A good Plan reduces the likelihood of misunderstanding, conflict, and disappointme...

Jan 26, 2023

Project Tools: Which to Choose?

Blog

There are many tools to help project teams manage their work, collaborate, and track performance.  The number of options is overwhelming—Capterra has published over 900-project management tool reviews. I teach project management classes and am often ...

Feb 28, 2021

Show Calendar Days instead of Dates in MS Project Schedule columns

Blog

Sometimes during tender or bid submission for a project, the client might not provide a Project start date and bidders would be required to show ordinal dates in the Gantt chart timeline and calendar days in the start and finish dates columns, so tha...

Mar 9, 2021

Be Productive by Focusing on Value

Blog

Productivity is defined as our ability to create value.  Traditionally manufacturers and farmers became more productive by adding resources—people and machines—to the process.  Knowledge workers can generate more value by working smarter, rather than...

Apr 30, 2020

Feedback: The Right Way

Blog

Feedback is a critical and valuable management tool.  For managers, it is the engine of continuous improvement.   For employees, it is the gift of valuable insight.  Unfortunately, many managers feel uncomfortable giving regular feedback, which depri...

Jun 4, 2020

Agile Beyond IT: Lean Thinking

Blog

Agile is a mindset described by a set of values and principles.  It traces its roots to Lean, which is also foundational to other modern management theories.  Lean’s primary focus is delivering value quickly and eliminating waste.  Toyota was a Lean ...

Aug 6, 2022