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After Change: How to Make Sure Your Transition Sticks
April 19, 2022
Part four of a series teaching you all about the emotional change curve, including details on each phase, how to support people in each phase, and how to help them move to the next phase. You'll learn how to listen for key phrases, which will help you identify which phase someone is in, and what to do and not do to increase the likelihood of them moving to the next phase. Focus: 3 Phases of Transition, the Transitional Process and How Change Management Affects Transition
Change Management: How to Deliver Employees to the Promised Land of Acceptance
April 5, 2022
Part three of a series teaching you all about the emotional change curve, including details on each phase, how to support people in each phase, and how to help them move to the next phase. You'll learn how to listen for key phrases, which will help you identify which phase someone is in, and what to do and not do to increase the likelihood of them moving to the next phase. Focus: Depression, Testing and Acceptance
How to Help Angry Employees Process Change
March 11, 2022
Part two of a series teaching you all about the emotional change curve, including details on each phase, how to support people in each phase, and how to help them move to the next phase. You'll learn how to listen for key phrases, which will help you identify which phase someone is in, and what to do and not do to increase the likelihood of them moving to the next phase. Focus: Anger and Bargaining
Guiding Employees Through the Many Stages of Change
February 22, 2022
Part one of a series teaching you all about the emotional change curve, including details on each phase, how to support people in each phase, and how to help them move to the next phase. You'll learn how to listen for key phrases, which will help you identify which phase someone is in, and what to do and not do to increase the likelihood of them moving to the next phase. Focus: Stability, Immobilization and Denial
How To Deal With Uneven Agile Adoption Rates
May 25, 2021
Measuring agile maturity between different teams is as much of a challenge as measuring the effectiveness of more classical team compositions. First, it’s important to realize that the adoption and effectiveness of agile practices depends heavily on the products the teams are working on. Some teams will be slower in their adoption simply because agile is less applicable to them.
How Wagile Sows Confusion And Chaos On Project Management Teams
March 30, 2021
The process of adopting a few practices and not fully committing from the beginning is what we would call “testing the agile waters.” It is much like wanting to gradually enter a cold lake from the shoreline instead of quickly jumping in from the end of a dock. By entering slowly, the option to turn back always exists, but the process takes longer and is wrought with fear and doubt the entire time. By jumping in, on the other hand, the swimmer is instantly and completely wet — and can conquer the fear quickly.
Chair Management
January 11, 2021
You might think seniority or good performance will guarantee a raise and a new role. Here’s why that’s faulty logic — and how to improve your chances. It’s a new year, and many people are looking for new professional challenges and a higher salary. CM is an acronym commonly used to represent change management, but today I want to talk to you about a different...
Why a Certified Change Management Certification (CCMP) Will Be Highly Sought-After in Tech
November 23, 2020
While project managers focus on the technical aspects of delivering a change — such as budget, scope and timeline — change managers focus on the people affected. As we near the end of a tumultuous year that has forced billions of workers to deal with major upheavals to the way we do business, I’ve been thinking about what it means to navigate large-scale change effectively. In the field of project management, we’ve codified...
10 Dos and Don'ts of Agile Transitions
November 10, 2020
Change is hard. There is no denying that an agile transition is a major change, and subsequently, hard. In fact, there has never been an easy agile transition. Every agile transition that has ever taken place has led to a dip in performance, and every future agile transition will lead to a dip in performance. We know this because transitions have been studied for years. Transitions over time can be visually represented...
Waterfall Vs. Agile
September 3, 2020
The topic of waterfall vs. agile can feel like a battle between good and evil, if you’re a firm believer in only one of the methodologies. Each methodology, however, has advantages over the other and should be applied to projects where those advantages will make meaningful differences. Too often, we allow our logical thinking to lead us to create a hybrid of waterfall and agile; our reasoning has us believe that combining the two methodologies will leave us with the best of both. That seductive illusion, however, leads to the worst of both worlds — and it can’t be avoided.
Move Away From Wagile
July 30, 2020
Today, organizations no longer become agile by choice or innovative tendencies, but rather for competitive survival. Twenty years after the birth of the agile manifesto, agile transformations remain a risky challenge for organizations, and many end up in a waterfall-agile hybrid, known as wagile. Contrary to traditional thinking, adopting a hybrid of the two methodologies is worse than just using one.
The Poisonous Watermelon
November 14, 2018
By concealing the true status of a project, you shut down assistance from colleagues and set them up to escalate false information up the chain of command. Imagine this scenario: Dave was recently hired as a new project manager, and he comes to the organization with more than a decade of development experience. He recently completed a few project management certifications and is full of ambition and enthusiasm.
The 3 Hammers of IT Management
June 4, 2018
By creating or purchasing self-service tools, your IT department can decrease the cost of operation, lower queue times and increase customer satisfaction. I get some version of this question all the time: “Why can’t you just do it for me? It won’t take you long, and isn’t that what you’re supposed to do anyway?” Ah, the life of an IT professional. My answer is always the same: “No problem! Just submit a ticket in our system. Oh, sorry. I couldn’t help noticing you rolling your eyes. I understand your frustration; I really do. Sometimes it takes us a while for us to get to requests like these..."
Release Triage
January 29, 2018
In the medical field, the word triage is used to define the sorting of patients according to a system of priorities, designed to maximize the success of treatment. A triage is set up in an emergency room to help prioritize cases when a large number...
Going Above and Beyond
September 19, 2016
If you are like me, you don’t like to deliver only what is expected of you; you strive to exceed expectations. Maybe that phrase is used in your annual review and there is a larger financial gain for doing so. Maybe you possess a competitive spirit and have ambition to do more than everyone else. Maybe you were raised or trained to always deliver more than the bare minimum.
20 Common ITIL Misconceptions
September 9, 2016
What is ITIL? Information Technology Infrastructure Library, or ITIL, is a widely accepted approach to IT Service Management (ITSM), which has been adopted by individuals and organizations across the world. ITIL provides a cohesive set of best practice, drawn from the public and private sectors internationally.