Leadership

The Nature of People – How Does It Affect What We Do?

By Jim Stanton / July 12, 2021 /

Dr. Wilder Penfield (1891-1976) was a neurosurgeon. In 1956 he published his work on Speech and Brain Mechanisms. During his surgical treatments on severely mentally ill patients, he discovered that stimulating different parts of the brain caused the patients to experience a variety of emotions. He found that the brain, through electrical stimulations, releases chemicals that activate the nervous system. These chemicals would induce feelings of fear, excitement, depression, sadness, aggression, anxiety, happiness, etc. He referred to this phenomenon as the chemistry of thought.

Read More

Change Management Consideration Series

By Jim Stanton / June 30, 2021 /

The purpose of this series is to inquire, examine, study, and uncover some of the facts, truths, realities, and complexities of change management. The goal is to build a solid understanding and foundation for effectively dealing with change implementation challenges.

Read More

Is Your Culture Hurting or Helping?

By Jim Stanton / May 5, 2021 / Comments Off on Is Your Culture Hurting or Helping?

Do you manage the culture? Or does it manage you? How do we determine its effectiveness and influence throughout the organization?

Read More

We’re Humans, Not Robots.

By Scott Stribrny / April 7, 2021 / Comments Off on We’re Humans, Not Robots.

Successful project managers exhibit critical thinking skills. But we are sometimes forced to make rapid decisions in situations for which we have never been trained. Why is it, that we so often demand absolute perfection of ourselves and our fellow project managers? We’re human, not a robot.

Read More

Part III – Organizational Transformation – Challenges and Strategies

By Alex Bojanic / August 4, 2020 / Comments Off on Part III – Organizational Transformation – Challenges and Strategies

Transformation Priorities   We talked in Part II of this blog series about elements of agile transformation with a focus on two main initiatives: process and technical agility. We laid out some ideas and details to consider and to understand approaches to scaling. But one question is still not answered – in what order of priority do you…

Read More

Part II – Organizational Transformation – Challenges and Strategies

By Alex Bojanic / July 27, 2020 /

Transformation Strategy Elements and Their Priorities   In the previous blog (Part I) we discussed organizational transformation and organizational culture as a factor that is often overlooked, yet is a factor that can greatly impact the outcome and  success of the agile transformation. But before we analyze that impact, lets briefly discuss key elements of a successful…

Read More

Part I – Organizational Transformation – Challenges and Strategies

By Alex Bojanic / July 18, 2020 /

Introduction Many of us with passion for software organizational transformation, and a passion for helping teams transition from traditional waterfall or other “ancient” development models to contemporary agile and lean processes, have been reading books, blogs, white papers about these transformations. We often go to various online forums and follow threads on this topic. And…

Read More

Project Portfolio: Planning Under Pressure

By Scott Stribrny / June 18, 2020 / Comments Off on Project Portfolio: Planning Under Pressure

With a structured and well-facilitated approach, one can move quickly and carefully to build/rebuild and manage the project portfolio your company requires to face challenges today —while also laying the critical next stepsfor prosperity tomorrow.

Read More
leadership

Seven Traits Good Project Managers Share: Do You Have Them?

By Scott Stribrny / May 12, 2020 / Comments Off on Seven Traits Good Project Managers Share: Do You Have Them?

Who’s the best project manager you ever worked with? This question, posed in a Q&A discussion after one of my recent corporate workshops, stimulated some fond reminiscing about all of the project managers I’ve respected through the years and what made them so good. It also probed into some comparison about what they all had in common. If you take nothing else from this post, do that … take some quiet time perhaps while sipping that second cup of morning rocket fuel, and develop a list of the project managers you’ve respected through the years. Then think about what traits they all had in common.

Read More

Are Your WFH Policies Helping or Hurting?

By Jim Stanton / May 6, 2020 / Comments Off on Are Your WFH Policies Helping or Hurting?

Sustaining pre-crisis employee engagement goes well beyond merely providing laptops, video conferencing and collaboration tools. Employees need to feel, believe, and experience being a valued team member. One of the most effective ways to show workers their value is to solicit their participation in improving their WFH experience by using their views and opinions.

Read More