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 […]

Remember the last time you joined a new team or organization. What was it like? Was it awkward? Did you make decisions easily? Were expectations clear? Did the team gel immediately? You probably answered “No” to these questions. High-performing teams do not form quickly or naturally. As a manager or project manager quickly moving your […]

Well facilitated brainstorming sessions are amazing. A creative, sharing atmosphere is built. Numerous ideas are generated. Participants feel productive, valued, and are enthusiastic. By contrast, poorly run meetings are horrible. Little is accomplished. People feel frustrated and that they wasted their time. Brainstorming is a valuable tool and has an almost endless number of uses: […]