Driving Digital Transformation with Work and Resource Management

Digital transformation initiatives fail for a number of reasons. Sometimes it’s due to a misunderstanding of what digital transformation actually is; other times, it’s because of an unwillingness to adapt to an ever-changing professional environment. According to Ventana Research, successful digital transformation requires the highest level of work and resource management to return the greatest...

How to Negotiate in the Workplace

Being able to listen, discuss and compromise is an important part of everyday life and can be especially important when it comes to the working world. Workplace negotiation skills allow people to better share ideas, overcome difficulties and create a unified solution. As such, knowing how to negotiate in the workplace is something that is...

Recognizing Low-Performing Employees & What You Can Do About Them

The time for annual performance reviews can bring up some rather uncomfortable moments for a manager that they may have been avoiding: dealing with low performing team members. It may not necessarily be a conscious decision, as recognizing low performing team members isn’t always the easiest task, but when it comes to performance reviews and...

Driving Agile at Scale: The Agile PMO

The success of Agile ways of working is driving the recent trend to scale it more broadly throughout the organization. Executives are eager to apply the speed and flexibility that individual teams are demonstrating to larger, more strategic initiatives. As a result, they are looking to the PMO, known for leading change management, to drive...

What Software Needs to Learn from Physical Product Delivery

In the Age of Mass Production, which began at the turn of the 20th century, we witnessed engineering organizations master complex product delivery.  Since that time, product complexity has continued to grow, fueled recently by an ever-growing number of electronic and software components. For example, in the 2000s, approximately 40 percent of a car’s cost...

Product Manager Tips to Better Organize, Prioritize, Schedule and Communicate

As a product manager, life can be quite chaotic, especially when dealing with multiple stakeholders and handling various channels of communication. Plus, with the ever-growing need for speed and innovation from organizations, it’s an understatement to say that a product manager’s schedule is only jam-packed most of the time. In such an environment where every...

How the Flow Framework® Maximizes Your Wins from Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®)

Many organizations have invested heavily or are considering investing in the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®) to improve their enterprise software delivery, where complex product work spans dozens of Agile development teams. Enterprises that have made strong strides down the SAFe path have trained and certified their teams, hired internal coaches, adopted new tools and implemented new...

The Pros and Cons of Banning Laptops in Meetings

Laptops and phones have become virtually omnipresent in most professional spheres and it has become the norm for staff to take either one or both into meetings with them in case they have a need to use them. A growing movement has begun however that seeks to ban the use of these in meetings, to...

Project to Product – Value Stream Networks

My review of the Project to Product book continues from Value Stream Metrics, with a tour of the Value Stream Network based on a study of no less than 308 toolchains and three more epiphanies. To avoid the spoiler, you will have to read the book for the context and the profound impact of the latter :-). The last part...