Your path to business agility
The British government’s extension of their Brexit deadline (from March 29 to October 31) appears to only be prolonging the pain of insecurity being felt by business in the UK. While in 2018, the UK economy had been bucking all trends and disproving those who had suggested that Brexit would be an unmitigated disaster, 2019...
Learn to Grow: How Pursuing Learning Helps Leaders—and Their Companies—Get Ahead In 2011, Herbert Hainer, the CEO of the Adidas Group, announced the company was going to try something new. It wasn’t a new line of shoes or testing out the latest in athletic technology. Hainer wanted to invest in his company’s employees by creating...
What separates elite, high-performance agile marketing teams in some enterprises, from their hard-working — and in some cases even harder working — yet less successful counterparts in other enterprises? It’s not that they borrow a page from the Folger’s Crystals playbook and secretly replace their marketing people with Scrum masters (who are kind of like...
This year’s Global SAFe® Summit was bigger and better than ever. With over 2,000 attendees, great presentations and the release of SAFe® 5.0, I had a tough time figuring out where to focus this blog. Based on the number of sessions on Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) and the conversations I had at the booth around...
Marketing operations can be roughly defined as the elements of marketing that allow it to run effectively and efficiently, including functions such as analysis, budgeting, project planning and reporting. As one international marketing operations consultant has described it, it’s “an injection of left-brain thinking into the typically right-brained-heavy marketing function.” With the rise of new...
Sometimes reality bites, like really. Unwritten reports, endless budget requests, unanswered emails, inboxes overflowing with unanswered emails — and that’s before you’ve even started your REAL work. If this sounds familiar to you it means that you know what a bottleneck is, because you’ve been one. A bottleneck occurs when a critical person or stage...
The immediate boost in team morale following a good status meeting can be like that all-important half-time team talk that turns a game around. However, it’s one thing to keep a team pumped for an hour or so to see them through to the end of a game, and something else entirely to keep them...
As a professional working in technology, it amazes me how much business has changed over the years. I’ve seen PMOs move from project management to portfolio management. I’ve seen Agile move from the team to team of teams. Now, I’m watching as we question, challenge, and evolve again with the rise of Lean Portfolio Management and the move to a product-centric...
There’s no question that technology and innovation are changing the world you live in at a very fast pace. Wasn’t it just yesterday that your dad carried his mobile phone in a big bag everywhere he went? In the world of business – tech innovation and the disruption it brings – are upending the way...
You might have heard the story before. It was 1962, and President John F. Kennedy was visiting NASA headquarters in Washington D.C. for the first time. While touring the grounds, he spotted a janitor carrying a broom. The president stopped, walked over, and asked what the man did at NASA. “I’m helping put a man...
