Zacharias Beckman
It’s never a good time for training
As Jamin Arvig, President of WaterFilters.net learned the hard way, putting off training has a cost of its own: Lost employees. As Jarmin wrote in his A Worker Quit — Because I Didn’t Train Him To Succeed, if you don’t arm your employees to succeed they’ll eventually go elsewhere to look for career advancement. “[It] [...]
Training is number one
As I’ve pointed out more than once, training your employees is one of the best things you can do to benefit your business and your team. Even so, fears about what happens if you train your staff and they leave to find a better job are prevalent — but consider the alternative: What happens if [...]
First, care. Care intensely.
Excellent advice found on 43 folders: Before you sweat the logistics of focus: first, care. Care intensely. We spend a great deal of time working on “engaging the team” or engaging ourselves when what we really need to do is find the willpower to focus on the foremost problem at hand. As Merlin points out, [...]
Hiring for the culture
Hiring the right people means more than identifying good technical skills. A person’s resume can be outstanding, but it won’t matter one whit if personalities clash or new hires just don’t mesh with your culture. As Dan McCarthy writes in How to Hire for Cultural Fit, “It’s not what you know, but how you fit [...]
Common oversights in choosing methodology
Changing the way a business operates is a daunting task. It involves assessing and understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the current organization, identifying solutions to the weaknesses without compromising the strengths and, ultimately, changing the way people work. Above all, people tend to be resistant to change — and this is the most common issue that arises when adopting a new methodology.
Why Agile isn’t enough (and why it doesn’t work)
Agile methods are powerful tools when used properly — but as with all tools, they can be misused. The critics of agile methods are many and vocal, calling Agile a poorly thought-out “shortcut” that fails to get the job done. And with 90% of projects failing to meet objectives, the criticism is valid. So is Agile just hype or is there something to it? And if there is, why are project success ratios so abysmal? Here’s the scoop on why Agile doesn’t work and what to do about it.
Fix your boss (or, reduce risk to quality using a matrix approach)
How do you ensure that one person doesn’t derail your entire project? Most of us have been there before. Maybe it’s a co-worker who doesn’t work well with the team. Maybe it’s your boss, who has to oversee every single decision even though he’s an overtasked bottleneck. Either problem poses a critical risk to your project: Delays, mistakes and rework because one person isn’t part of a streamlined effort. Learn how the situation can be improved, realizing positive gains in this habitually entrenched process.
Quality versus quantity
Qualitative decisions often lose out to quantitative decisions. Every one of us lives this every day, quite often without realizing that we are doing it. It’s not enough to define our process or methodology and let it settle in. Yes, we absolutely need to have a clearly defined and adopted set of processes and procedures. But at the same time, it’s important to never let it become too rote.
Whiteboard as a PM tool
Sometimes we forget that some of the best tools are the simplest ones. If you had to pick just one tool for project management what would it be? I think in my case a whiteboard comes out pretty near the top, if not the top. My point is, focus on the work at hand, not [...]
Scrum is not an agile methodology
People have lost sight of the fact that Scrum is not a methodology. I see comments such as “Scrum is killing agile” and it drives home, with emphasis, that there’s a huge disconnect between understanding what an agile methodology is and what Scrum is (and I know I’m beating a dead horse, but it’s important [...]
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