Navigating the Make Versus Buy Decision: a Crowdsourced Check List

Product managers facing the make versus buy decision for their organization have a lot to consider. Biases abound. In this article, the innovation architect Doug Collins shares what was on the minds of senior product management leaders on this topic when they convened, recently. Their top 10 factors follow below. The Make versus Buy versus...

Portfolio Prioritization Best Practices – Enrich Consulting

Our latest video covers prioritization by value metrics, when to use productivity metrics, how to build a frontier chart, and when to temper simple prioritization with more sophisticated methods. You can see it here, right now. As always, we’d love to hear your comments and suggestions on topics for future videos.

Lost in Translation: Why EA Teams Must Speak the Language of Business

Sometimes, perception is reality. Consider your Enterprise Architecture (EA) team – respected for their technical savvy, the EA team makes sure IT systems run smoothly so the business can rapidly implement new strategies. EA teams play a critical role in achieving alignment between technology and the business. Yet, too often, there is an awareness gap...

How to Get Buy-in for Your Innovation Project

Editor’s note: this is a guest post by Steve Glaveski. Getting (and retaining) buy-in from decision makers for innovation projects is often the stumbling block that many a corporate innovator and intrapreneur faces. Securing buy-in seems akin to a dark art of sorts that only the most astute political game players and people influencers are capable...

Moving from a Ticket System to Agile Marketing Methods

So many marketers are struggling with trying to manage their myriad of projects, efficiently. With so many involved, communication can lack. As a marketer myself, I can relate. We have so much to accomplish, and with very high standards. Communicating with stakeholders (often remote or in different time zones) via email and managing projects on...

Ideas Are Cheap

The front end of innovation focuses on the ideation stage. It is a place of creativity, crowdsourcing, and collaboration. It involves sticky notes, labs, interviews, and sometimes arts and crafts, all in the name of capturing the voice of the customer to deliver “the next big thing.” The right-brained people in the room absolutely LOVE...

Metric-Driven Coaching

W. Edwards Deming said, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” But how do you know if you’re measuring the right things? All too often teams fall prey to misleading metrics, missing invaluable opportunities to grow and improve. In this webinar, I’ll show you how to choose the right metrics to measure your team’s effectiveness and encourage the right...

3 Tips for Better Team Management

The job role, “Project Manager” has a dual meaning. Not only is there the obvious definition of ‘someone who plans, procures and executes a project’ but in the vast majority of cases, it also denotes someone who manages a project team. Managing a team, who may be a disparate group of employees spread far and...

Open Sourcing Eclipse Dropwizard Tools

Here at Tasktop we really like industry standards. It’s important for us to use well known tools and frameworks to make transitions between teams easier. When it comes to creating a REST API there is no way around JAX-RS in the Java world. But JAX-RS (or one of it’s implementations) is not a full server...