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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Excellent “Strategy+Business” article (free registration required) on “See For Yourself” advice for executives wanting to short circuit innovation cycles; it is a great history on lean/”go and see” origins of Toyota, Wal-Mart and others who have adopted these techniques. The idea of short-circuiting the cycles created by the barriers of multi-level organizations, approval and budgeting processes exists […]
Rueben Slone, Executive VP of Supply Chain for Office Max looks outside his company for innovations. His quote in APICS magazine’s article (sorry, membership required), “Career Essentials: Adept Supply Chain Professionals Help Companies Thrive” caught my attention:
“The difference between a groove and a grave is only the depth.”
He’s speaking about comfort levels and the ability […]
I had one of those “you’re messing up” conversations with a person who I have given permission to tell me such things. Miki, who writes Leadership Turn, said that my PMO emphasis seems forced and only for a big company audience. I agreed. The “Office” in PMO seems to conjure up a large group of […]
The “Choosing the Right PMO Vision” series (20 posts I did in November 2007) is a step-by-step approach for executives to consider a few PMO models to implement. They run the gamut from low-value “repository” type models to high-value PMOs that can increase strategy execution from 10% to 90%. Wouldn’t that be nice!
For those of […]
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