Many organizations try to catapult into agility.  Striving to instantaneously transform their traditional practices and culture.   Unfortunately, this strategy is usually painful and often fails. The Scrum Guide states, “Scrum is easy to understand, but difficult to master.”  Basic training can be quickly and easily accomplished in just a few days.  However, being Agile is […]

The Project Management Institute (PMI) is making a bold pivot toward agile.  As a project manager and an agilist, I am excited by these moves.  At the same time, it is hard to envision both this transition and the future state.  In this article, I share some of my thoughts about the upcoming changes to […]

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 scrum team is in trouble. In my agile training and consulting practice, I […]

Knowledge Management (KM) is broadly defined as the process of creating and sharing information across the organization.  Its goal is to enable learning.  KM became a formal business disciple in the 1990s even though it dates back centuries.  I believe that project management follows the apprenticeship model. Throughout my management career, creating a learning environment […]

Organizational change and transformation efforts are often challenging.  Most fail to meet their planned objectives with 30% failing outright.  In my last article, ”Road Trippin’ Organizational Change: The Beginning”, I recommending using adaptive-agile planning practices and treating the effort like a road trip: Set the direction, not the destination.  Set high-level goals and the strategic […]

Most organizational change efforts do not succeed.  They fail to achieve the desired results.  They are disruptive and sometimes leave the company worse-off.  An oft-cited statistic is that 70% of organizational change efforts fail.  This metric is attributed to Hammer and Champy’s 1993 classic, “Reengineering the Corporation”    and is reinforced by a 2008 McKinsey survey  […]

Lean and Agile organizations have harnessed the power of the stand-up meeting as a valuable process tool.  The stand-up is an efficient and effective way to communicate.  It promotes transparency into the progress of work and highlights issues.  The meeting fosters a collaborative work environment and creates accountability.  In this article, I share best practices […]

“You are not in the room for the conversations that impact your career.” Farley Price I was having dinner with an old friend and colleague.  We were talking about the arc of our careers and the events that brought us to this point.  Farley remarked that we are rarely present for important conversations that affect […]

Kanban is a versatile and powerful tool to help you manage your work.  It can be used to track personal projects, complex operations and large programs; for example, it can be used to: Efficiently manage the flow of inventory in a factory, Help students manage their homework and papers, Track the progress of project tasks […]

  “All good lessons come at a cost.  Try to learn them inexpensively.”  Howard Zucker When I made a mistake as a child, my father would remind me that all lessons come at a cost.  The goal was to learn them cheaply.  I did not always follow this maxim.  But, this pearl of wisdom stayed […]