The Persuasive Innovator: Influencing People to Collaborate

When you introduce the practice of collaborative innovation to your organization, you make the case to your colleagues that the approach will benefit them more than the status quo. Why might they agree with you? Have you developed your campaign of persuasion? Innovation architect Doug Collins shares his thinking on how you might influence people...

Five Essential Insights for Maximizing Limited Resources

Based on The 2014 Resource Management and Capacity Planning Report Some of you may be skeptical at the title of my blog post. Can the resource dilemma be solved and even mastered? You’re not alone if the norm at your organizations looks like this: resources are always overcommitted, no one ever says “no”, and you’ve...

Forget risk management; long live resilience management – Enrich Consulting

We are surrounded by evidence of resilience: Our immune systems fight off thousands of potential invaders every day and constantly hone their defenses in response to the threats they experience. Ecosystems evolve to use the forces that might otherwise threaten them, such as the sequoia forests of the Sierra Nevada, which don’t just survive forest...

Get the Hell OUT: Sound Advice to Foster Innovation

Inspiration on how to foster innovation can come from an unlimited number of places and in a lot of different forms. And at the recent Prepared Foods New Products Conference, a fantastic group of food and beverage product development gurus shared their insights on uncovering the next big thing. How these clever companies go about...

BEWARE: Smart People with Dumb Tools

You have intelligent people in your organization. You hire the best engineers, architects, IT managers and executives. Why insult their intelligence by providing them with tools built for the 90s? There was a time not that long ago when fluency with Excel was a measurement of your business acumen, but today there are spreadsheet alternatives...

Serenity now – achieving simplicity in a busy world

Do you remember what tv character George Costanza’s father occasionally used to scream when things got heated in a hugely famous ’90s sitcom? Even if you literally haven’t done the same, I bet you have felt like screaming “serenity now!” more than once. Ask yourself what’s your schedule like this week, and start to do...

The Only Way To Predict Your Future Is To Create It

Innotas has had a number of customer and prospect conversations where the need for a corporate or IT-driven “cloud initiative” was a critical need.  After hearing this, we reflect on the rapid change of cloud solutions from the early adopters and point solutions to broader acceptance of cloud solutions across the globe. We now see purpose...

Connecting Microsoft TFS, Visual Studio Online and ServiceNow

I’m very excited to share this video with Tasktop followers, partially because I’ve been promising it for upwards of 3 months (Tom, Sam, and Will: sorry for the delays), and partially because this has been an interesting integration case that customers are asking for more and more. Conceptually, large companies are having to deal with...

What is Card Size and Why Does it Matter?

Many teams find it useful to identify and track the size — or amount of work — associated with each work item. Planview AgilePlace lets you easily assign a size value to each card,  manage your WIP based on card size, and run reports using size as a variable. In Planview AgilePlace, size is an optional field...

How to Run Effective Standups and Retrospectives

Step three of The Kanban Roadmap: How to Get Started in 5 Steps As a systems-thinking methodology, Kanban calls for team members to take collective responsibility for team priorities. Rich conversations about the work are a must-have. They help the team discover bottlenecks, resolve issues, focus on flow, and continuously improve their process. To facilitate these...