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Project Management 411

January 23rd, 2008

Value Drives the Best Tech and User Collaboration

My post on Overcoming Language Barriers facilitated some very nice sharing of resources. Executives and managers! You need to familiarize yourself with this information; you will benefit through improved understanding of what your IT projects should be doing for you:
1. Excellent discussion on Domain Driven development from Sensei at ActiveEngine’s Cool Stuff post. This is […]

By Bob Turek -- 5 comments

January 19th, 2008

Business Intelligence Projects Find an Ally in Agile Software Development

Intelligent Enterprise article “The Seven Pillars of BI Success” closed with a success story where agile software development processes came into play. 1-800 Contacts, winner of 2006 TDWI Best Practice Award, first aligned their BI project with a call-center-incentive project. The agile software development approach fostered high value innovative ideas to allow monitoring and improvement […]

By Bob Turek -- 0 comments

January 13th, 2008

Overcoming Language Barriers in Project Communication

Margaret Rouse at IT Knowledge Exchange continues our conversation on PMOs. We started by talking about how a PMO relieves pain, then the PMO’s role in dealing with the dreaded mythical queue of projects, and now language barriers in agile software development projects .
My post on how previous experience with lean manufacturing might overcome some […]

By Bob Turek -- 7 comments

December 31st, 2007

Fine Tuning the Use of Lean to Sell Agile

Here is a slightly edited conversation with ActiveEngine following his response to my post on using lean experience to justify agile software development. It may be that non-IT executives don’t need to know about agile processes- just that the IT department is doing a lot more collaborating, testing and verifying throughout the software development process […]

By Bob Turek -- 2 comments

December 25th, 2007

Can Lean Explain Agile?

My discussion with agile software development project managers led to some great insights into overcoming barriers to agile transformation. I started by surmising that a company who had done lean manufacturing would be more likely to pursue agile software development. When asked why, I gave the example of “quality at the source” and compared it […]

By Bob Turek -- 4 comments

December 16th, 2007

How to Make An Organization Fly

A great article in Strategy+Business, “A Blueprint for Strategic Leadership”, concentrates on how to lead innovation. In it the authors emphasize that the best leaders pay a great deal of attention to the design of the elements around them. Seemingly basic, but powerful, things to do are:
1. Articulate purpose,
2. Create effective teams,
3. Prioritize and sequence […]

By Bob Turek -- 0 comments

December 15th, 2007

Spend Less While Innovating More? Yes!

A Booz Allen Hamilton survey and report in Strategy+Business (register for free) found NO correlation existed between R&D spend and innovation. It turns out that higher innovation performers spent less but made sure that innovation projects aligned with corporate strategy and paid careful attention to customers. This idea that a company can spend less and […]

By Bob Turek -- 4 comments

December 12th, 2007

Organizations as “Boxes” Analogy Reveals Power of Projects

Sometimes you get unexpected insights. My post “What’s Harder? Project Management or Management” elicited a wonderfully simple “boxes” analogy from Ren Garcia at Accounting Solver. In it he said:
“In a standard hierarchical corporate organization, you have specializations through boxes (i.e., departments, divisions, sections, etc) identifying finance, marketing, production, human resources, etc. Frequently, the specializations become […]

By Bob Turek -- 3 comments

December 11th, 2007

Agile Transformation Strategy Is A Lot Like Lean

 
Fascinating conversation with an executive of an agile software development firm about transformation projects as they compare to lean manufacturing initiatives. Lean transformations have settled into starting with training heavily laced with practical activities. The reason that this is so important is that the approach is NOT intuitive.
Lean requires a person to experience how the concepts can […]

By Bob Turek -- 0 comments

December 10th, 2007

Agile Manufacturing Enables Transformation

A recent September 2007 Gartner study titled “Building Agile Manufacturing That Enables Transformation” made several great points:
1. Changing forces in market, customer expectations and technology demand more agility and quickness in business processes.
2.  Using a ”myths” leading to “misses” discussion they challenge people to look outside their environment for innovations saying that people and companies tend to “lock […]

By Bob Turek -- 0 comments