News

How to Do Strategic Planning Like a Futurist

  • by Amy Webb

I recently helped a large industrial manufacturing company with its strategic planning process. With so much uncertainty surrounding autonomous vehicles, 5G, robotics, global trade, and the oil markets, the company’s senior leaders needed a set of guiding objectives and strategies linking the company’s future to the present day. Before our work began in earnest, executives had already decided on a title for the initiative: Strategy 2030. I was curious to know why they chose that specific year — 2030 — to benchmark the work. After all, the forces affecting the company were all on different timelines: Changes in global trade were immediate concerns, while the field of robotics will have incremental advancements, disappointments, and huge breakthroughs

How to become a Product Owner – 5 Simple Steps

  • by Jay Rahman

How to become a Product Owner – 5 Simple Steps. The Product Owner is a critical accountability in Agile and Scrum. And although the Scrum Guide doesn’t give much guidelines around great Product Ownership, the role is still absolutely necessary for great Agile and Scrum Teams. There is a lot to do to become a great Product Owner and this role is not for the faint of heart. But if you love creating great products and services that delight your customers, read on. Having trained, coached and mentored a number of Product Owners over the years, there is a clear trend in terms of what great Product Owners do.

Post Mortem After Successful Project Closure

  • by Project Management Academy

As business owners, operators and/or managers responsible for implementing initiatives, we sometimes overlook the value of learning something from our past projects. It is very understandable to ask for a post-mortem on a failed project. However, ask almost any Project Management Professional® to do a post-mortem on a successful project and you will probably get a strange look from them. Too often we focus on celebrating our successful projects (as we should) and talk minimally about why it was successful.

How to build more diverse and inclusive project teams

  • by Moira Alexander

Learn four steps leaders can take to increase diversity and inclusion on project teams, and find out how those changes might benefit their businesses. Diverse and inclusive project teams can provide businesses with many benefits. The most diverse teams are more likely to outperform less diverse teams, according to findings by McKinsey. This also holds true when managing projects. Team diversity can improve project success rates through an increased sense of community and support, decreased conflict and increased innovation.

YDS: Planned vs Actual is a TERRIBLE Metric for Scrum Teams!

  • by Ryan Ripley

On today’s episode of YOUR DAILY SCRUM: Planned vs Actual is a TERRIBLE Metric for Scrum Teams! Today's we explore "Planned vs Actual" and discuss why it's such a terrible metric for Scrum Teams. Todd and Ryan focus on the anti-patterns and horrible practices that emerge when this metric is used to measure the success of a team. All of this and more are discussed in today's episode of Your Daily Scrum with Todd Miller and Ryan Ripley.

Link Roundup: Active Listening

  • by Jouny Al Rumhein, Alexandra Grasset

One of the main reasons communication between people breaks down is that listening (like reading, thinking clearly and focusing) is a skill which we rarely consider to be something requiring study and practice. Active listening is a technique for developing our ability to listen by putting ourselves in to other person’s shoes. This means trying to understand the speaker’s own understanding of an experience without the listener’s own interpretive structures intruding on his or her understanding of the other person.

How to Choose the Right KPIs for Your Product

  • by Roman Pichler

What are KPIs? Key performance indicators (KPIs) are metrics that measure how your product is doing. Effective KPIs help you understand if your product is creating the desired value for the users, the customers, and the business. Without KPIs, you end up guessing how well your product is performing. It’s like driving a car with your vision blurred: You can’t see if you are heading in the right direction or getting closer to your destination. You might have a hunch, but you don’t know if it is correct. Using KPIs and collecting the relevant data helps you balance intuition with empirical evidence. This increases the chances of making the right decisions and achieving product success.

9 Essential process improvements that you can use to cut costs in 2021

  • by planisware

Counterintuitive ideas and some best practice tips to help you save money and improve your company's processes and project management. With process improvement, companies can cut costs (and build excellent habits) by streamlining routine activities. This article outlines some counterintuitive ideas and some best practice tips to help you save money and improve your company's processes. Let's start with the observation that some improvements are more valuable than others, thanks to XKCD. Their graph reminds us to experiment and prioritize the changes that save the most time and money.

rd-navbar rd-navbar-minimal rd-navbar-original