Archive for October, 2010
Doing away with ineffective, broken risk management
Risk management has become mainstream. It’s no longer the domain of rocket scientists and actuaries. In fact, it’s become so mainstream that formal risk management practices are showing up everywhere we look. But is all this sudden attention to risk management going in the right direction? Or are recently defined risk management methods just introducing unproven, sometimes crackpot solutions into a well-understood space? Find out why Harvard Business Review found that “Most of the management tools and techniques we studied had no direct causal relationship to superior business performance.”
The obituary exercise
Get your team to write an obituary for your project — before you start the project. Make it part of your risk planning exercise. This exercise is related to the Merlin backward planning exercise and is also used in the Toyota Production System. Toyota used the obituary approach when creating their “Toyota University” program and engaged [...]
When there’s a freeloader on your team
According to extensive research The Gallup Organization (Washington D.C.) and Harvard Business Review have conducted over the past decade, few factors are as corrosive to employee engagement as a colleague who skates through the workweek taking advantage of the much harder work of others. What’s the cost of disengagement? Much more than any manager wants [...]
Is Scrum Master Certification Hurting Our Industry?
Having created a methodology that tightly integrates Scrum concepts, I tend to be a strong proponent of Scrum. But being a strong proponent doesn’t extend so far as to promote all the hype — I’m also a very strong believer in the value of formal education and the need for experience. After seeing the negative [...]
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