Balancing Cool with Necessity
Very often, for an established business or for one struggling to enter an existing market space, the biggest challenge is how to balance those features which are expected in that domain of products with those that will set the business apart from the competition. How well that tightrope is walked often makes or breaks the perceived value of the product, and sometimes the overall success of business. Read more
Refine the Messaging Platform
There are a lot of things that I like about the agile movement, many of the things I have been doing myself or recommending to clients for years. Short iterations, plenty of interaction, early value and strong leverage of change. A critical new improvement is that it is now OK to talk about how you are going to approach a problem, to talk about process without thinking that the whole thing is a waste of time and money: a nasty stigma has been removed. One thing that is still holding us back, though, is the argument by many agilistas that you have to jump on the bandwagon or you won’t be successful. Read more
Go With Your Strength
I see many companies that start out with a compelling idea for solving a nasty business problem, but somewhere along the way their implementation gets a lot fuzzier. In more than a few situations, we are best served if we remember to go with our strength. Read more
Consulted
I’m in the process of putting together a project that will involve a number of external resources from different disciplines. The intent is to build a product that will require technical, sales and marketing resources, and likely some branding and analytics effort, most of which will come from external consultants that I know. Being a consultant myself, I have learned the cost of totally missing the mark with a proposal, but I think this is the first time it has happened to me. I feel I have not been listened to, I feel insulted. I realize that this is the concern I often have to battle against with prospects, that they are going to feel ‘consulted’. Read more
Getting Past the Hype
Filed under: Agility, Leadership, Process, Project management
Agile Project Management is becoming the latest in a long line of named approaches to software development or project management that promises improved project performance – watch for it on a bookshelf or seminar near you. As with most approaches, this is a clear, consistent collection of practices that hold together well and can indeed reduce project risk for most organizations, but unless there are drastic changes to how this approach is presented, and even deeper changes to how it is typically adopted in organizations, I think the likelihood of providing consistently strong results in the industry are slim. Read more
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