Zacharias Beckman
Managing risk in global projects
One of the most significant risks we identify is a globally disparate (geographically separated) team. Teams working in separate regions face tremendous challenges that a co-located team doesn’t have to think about, a situation made worse when outsourcing, where conflicts in language, time, culture, and business environment all affect the organization.
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 [...]
Be human on your “about page”
Seth Godin offers some good advice regarding your company image: “When someone comes to your site for the first time, they’re likely to hit ‘about’ or ‘bio’. Why? Because they want a human, a story and reassurance.” Don’t use meaningless jargon, talk like a normal person, and if you put up a picture don’t use [...]
Bad employees rarely quit and good ones are hard to find
Finding great employees is really hard. I don’t mean it’s difficult — I mean it’s virtually impossible to succeed in hiring great employees all the time. It’s equally hard to keep them, as it turns out. As Don Rainey recently wrote: Good employees are really hard to find — A solid worker isn’t just difficult to find, [...]
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, [...]
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