Innovation Management: 3 Tips for Igniting Valuable Ideas

What does innovation management mean to you? Does it mean gathering ideas or does it mean building a culture of engagement? If you answered yes to both, you’re on the right track. You need ideas to be innovative, but you need an innovation culture to continually source the most valuable ideas. The concept of “building...

Log4j 2 – The Ghost in the logging framework

It was exactly one day after my vacation. Starting to get back into the groove, I had a quick chat with my fellow engineer Holger (Staudacher). He casually mentioned that he found a really confusing test failure the other day that we should pair up on. Ready to start digging into some code again, he...

Fossil Fuels Produce Less Than Half of Britain’s Electricity for the First Time

Man-made climate change is an inescapable fact backed by 97% of the world’s scientific community, and it constitutes one of the greatest ever existential threats to the survival of humanity. The move to push people and countries towards more responsible means of living has many supporters, but seems to face a lot of intransigence at...

Shift Happens – 5 Key Takeaways from the 2019 Global SAFe® Summit

Last week, I attended the 2019 Global SAFe® Summit with my Planview family. We (Planview) got to reveal our new brand identity one day into the event, an unveiling that was met with an overwhelmingly positive reaction. Going into the conference with this excitement, I also carried the perspective and outlook of both a Value...

Lean Portfolio Management for a Successful Agile Transformation

As I sat in the airport last week, I saw people running to catch their flights, others meandering with time to kill, and a few others waiting patiently in line to rebook a missed or cancelled flight. Sometimes travel is very predictable while other times it’s fraught with delays, the unknown, and frustrations. As I...

Business Optimism in the UK Plummets

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...

Better Leadership Through Learning

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...

7 Characteristics of High-Performance Agile Marketing Teams

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...

Global SAFe Summit Learnings: Start Small with Lean Portfolio Management

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...

Why Process is the New Black for Marketing Ops

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...