deliverable

Optimizing the Wrong Part of Knowledge Management

I sat in on the report-out session from a kaizen event this week, and something occurred to me as I reviewed a ton of interesting findings in a very short time ... Best Practice Self-contained deliverables are the most powerful tools for knowledge knowledge transfer you can have in your organization. I'm talking about a document that stands on its own, and effectively communicates an idea without needing the author nearby to explain anything. The topic doesn't matter - conceptual…

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Three Business-Case Arguments for Agile, & The Moose On The Table

Another conversation at the start of the new year - this time in our PMO, concerning project prioritization and resource assignments. Many organizations follow a "parallel" model, launching multiple projects at any one time and working concurrently to move things forward. To be fair, this often occurs because we start work on one or two things, only to have additional worthy business requirements pop-up as time goes by. Unfortunately, we don't stop the first project or delay the second; most…

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PM Anti-Patterns That Increase IT Project Cycle Time

Lots of conversation at work these days about PMO, resource prioritization, and reducing cycle time for IT projects. I feel a series of posts coming on ... IAPL, we launched a project to bring test discipline to our technology efforts. The team was writing standards and guidelines for test scripts, implementing integrated testing tools supplied by the ERP vendor, and adding steps to our project methodology requiring test scripts for all system changes. As the project dragged into a fourth…

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Strategies for Fee Structures in Consulting Engagements

Yet another vendor seminar last month, and the idiosyncrasy of the day was an abnormal amount of focus on the fee structure (they were presenting their expertise on a certain platform, and talk of fees was a tad disconcerting). The vendor is, of course, railing against the fixed fee - puts all the risk on them, artificially constrains the project, etc. They didn't mention how the fixed fee enables an upside on their part - if the Vendor (contractor/consultant/them) pads…

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