Disobedient Talk

In a recent LinkedIn Live session, an attendee asked for the best approaches to keeping stand-up meetings from going too long. This is a common issue when you have an excited agile team looking to get things done quickly or having challenges. Here are approaches…

I just returned from an international holiday. It was fantastic, but I couldn’t help but feel like a project manager during the journey. It seems every time I step off a plane in a foreign country, I’m in the middle of a project. The skills…

I worked on a project with an interesting character named Eddie.  He was a nice guy, but he had difficulty getting to our team meetings on time.  I called Eddie aside one day and asked him why he was always late in the morning.  He…

Voltaire is credited with saying, “Perfection is the enemy of good enough”. Perfection implies that no degree of error is acceptable, whereas good enough implies that what you have is usable for the purpose you require. While we should strive to be more than just…

When working in a project environment, I appreciate predictable behaviors. They make your life easier because you can count on a degree of reliability from your team members. Team norms help instill predictability and establish trust without restricting flexibility and allowing people to produce their…

Have you ever tried to bust a piñata while blindfolded, with a group of people trying to give you directions?  Too high, too low, further to the right.  It can be tricky to hit the target when you can’t see what everybody else can see….

Have you ever tried doing one of those gigantic 2,000-piece jigsaw puzzles with the tiny, teeny pieces? It can take a long time to get the pieces to fit perfectly and reveal the final, magnificent result. But you can speed things up if you have…

Being a good manager means understanding what your team needs from you, and adapting your style to those needs.  Although you may have been appointed to a team management role because of your ability to apply your technical skills, the tools that honed your career…

When rescuing a project, you must alter the project management deliverables and approaches to control it. Your rescue effort and personal approach must be different. Otherwise, the project will end up troubled once again! Although you may need to modify some control deliverables, a few…

It may involve a few people or an entire organization. It might be a minor adjustment to respond to a change in customer support. Or it could be a full-scale “bet the business” initiative to leapfrog your competitors. No matter what the scale, there are…

Agile involves deep interaction between team members. When a team is distributed over multiple locations, extra care is needed to ensure things go well. Let’s look at activities to ensure your agile project delivers on its promise. The initial planning or Envision stage of the…

Larry Senn, a pioneer in corporate culture, concluded, ‘Culture is not an initiative. Culture is the enabler of all initiatives.’ Agile approaches require a culture shift from traditional project management.  So, how do you know if your corporate culture inhibits your organization from adopting agile…