Your path to business agility
In the 1970s, the Bee Gee’s harmoniously asked “how deep is your love?” Well, fast forward about four decades, and there’s another depth-related question that is on many peoples’ minds, but this time it’s not about wild passion: it’s about work performance. “How deep is your work?” is the question that author Cal Newport tackles...
Organizations around the world are embracing workplace collaboration, encouraging their employees to break down departmental silos and share ideas and information across the enterprise. Generally, this is a good thing—increased workplace collaboration usually results in higher efficiency, improved quality of work and a better workplace morale. There can be a downside to widespread collaboration, though,...
In the past, saying the phrase “use an agile approach” in most enterprise environments would trigger two very different reactions: developers would perk up, and everyone else would tune out. That’s because agile was linked exclusively to software development projects. And while scrum (and its many applications and expressions) remains alive and well, agile isn’t...
As a project manager, you can feel certain on almost every new project that something will go wrong along the way. You may not know what exactly it will be—unavailable resources, scheduling conflicts, changes in requirements or something else—but chances are that at least one part of your project plan will break. What separates average...
It is widely understood that collaboration is essential to organizational growth, success and, in the long run, survival. However, many organizations that have attempted to enable and promote enterprise social collaboration have discovered that the quantifiable benefits are underwhelming. Yes, there are many more conversations taking place – both online and offline. But no, performance,...
Does this sound familiar? A key task in your project is dependent on the completion of an earlier task by your organization’s IT or development team. However, IT and development are using their own tool to track their requirements and progress, and neither you nor anyone on your team have access to that tool. As...
Cross-functional teams, at least in theory, are good things for any organization. When employees are able to break out of their departmental silos and work closely with colleagues from other areas of the business, they have access to more information and a wider set of capabilities. When things go well, these teams are able to...
Employee engagement should be a top priority for every employer in 2017 and beyond. A growing body of research indicates that despite the critical importance of employee engagement in long-term organizational success, few companies have found the magic formula for keeping their workers happy and motivated. In fact, a recent employee engagement survey indicated that...
Large organizations cannot afford to treat their projects as isolated efforts. With dozens or even hundreds of projects underway at any given time, a strategic approach to portfolio management is the only way to avoid duplicated efforts, conflicting agendas and problems with resource allocation. Despite the obvious importance of portfolio management, many companies have difficulty...
For today’s enterprise project manager, data is everything. Team members need detailed information on their assigned tasks and the resources available in order to do their work, and senior leaders need accurate reporting in order to determine whether a project is on track to meet its objective. Project managers themselves need to gather and process...
