James King

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Archive for the ‘Leading change’ Category

Using a moments of truth analysis to assess a team’s readiness for change

Posted by James King on May 10, 2012

I have previously blogged about a number of approaches to assessing a team’s readiness for change, including the 7-S framework and the arenas of change approach, but today I thought I would explain a less well known approach – the “moments of truth” assessment.

Actually I made it up so it is not too well understood outside of my own loungeroom.  The approach is essentially the same as the 7-S style of assessing the interaction of the multiple systems, skills, stucture and other elements of the team’s whole ecosystem. But this is a little different because we start by looking at when (and why) the team’s internal or external customers interact with it.  Then we assess the team’s ability to support those interactions.

Moment of truth(n)  a moment when a person or thing is put to the test

Collins English Dictionary as quoted at www.thefreedictionary.com

Any interaction with a client is “a moment of truth” for the team. It tests the connection between the team’s value proposition, strategy, implementation, staff, skills and systems and it generates the experience that lasts in the customer’s memory until he or she interacts with the team again.

A “moments of truth analysis” therefore starts by identifying the interactions a team has with its customers, stakeholders and potentially vendors.

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Posted in Implementation, Investigation, Leading change | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

Performance agreements – a first attempt for agile project team members

Posted by James King on February 28, 2012

I was just reading an article on performance appraisals by Shane Hastie. It is a good summary of some of the issues that traditional performance appraisals cause on agile projects.

But it leaves two questions unanswered:

  • Where would you start if you actually had to do a performance agreement; and
  • How would you actually know what was expected of you if you didn’t?

The situation is made worse, according to the links in Shane’s article, when you want the team to be jointly accountable for shared success rather than individual success.  This is important if you want to work out how to evaluate testers or BA’s for example, because their purpose is to make the team successful rather than to stand out on their own.

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Posted in Agile development, Capability growth, Leading change | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

How can you manage people on projects these days?

Posted by James King on February 10, 2012

Life used to be easy for managers. We had good people who delivered lots of stuff and bad people who stuffed up lots of deliverables. It was easy to tell who the good guys and the bad guys were. 

But then something significant happened. We discovered that work was not just about performing a set of predictable tasks. We started to realise that:

  • Work was about adding value rather than destroying value rather than just delivering stuff; and
  • We started to see value as something delivered through the interaction of entire teams and not through individual achievement.

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Posted in Capability growth, Leading change | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Succession planning as an idea whose time has come

Posted by James King on February 9, 2012

Everywhere I go I am starting to notice consistent problems or patterns of behaviour that hold back some of the best people in the teams I work with. I think they are starting to rank right up their with the Peter Principle as ways to stop good people from reaching their true potential and really contributing value to the teams they work with.

And they are all related to the managers in the team not having enough time to talk about succession planning.

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Posted in Agile development, Capability growth, Leading change | Tagged: | 2 Comments »

A project charter for lazy teams

Posted by James King on February 6, 2012

I have been creating a couple of blogs on context recently. The idea is that if you know a bit about your users and the product that you are building. Both can take months or years, but I like to think we can even spend an hour or less to understand our project.

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Posted in Agile development, Idea management, Implementation, Leading change | Tagged: , , , | 5 Comments »

Become a Certified Strum Muckster (or CSA)

Posted by James King on July 27, 2011

With certification in agile becoming all the rage, I have decided to create a new international certification for trainers.

To become a Certified Strum Muckster you need to meet the strict sounding entry criteria for the International Strum Alliance and then abide by a number of rules that have been deemed by the International Strum Alliance  (currently me) to be the one true and correct way to create and deliver training courses.

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Posted in Agile fables, Leading change | Tagged: | 4 Comments »

Complications when motivating people on projects

Posted by James King on July 7, 2011

I wrote an article on how to motivate people on projects and I still think that the article contains everything a project manager really needs to know in order to motivate people.

But there are some consistent forces at work that enhance or upset your ability to motivate people in each project. So I thought I would list some of the ones I am aware of here:

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Posted in Leading change, Techniques | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Ways to motivate people on projects that often backfire

Posted by James King on June 26, 2011

I recently posted an article about motivating people on projects and as a result we had an interesting conversation with one of my colleagues.

We  discussed several approaches that are sometimes successful and sometimes detrimental.

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Posted in Capability growth, Leading change | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

How do you motivate people on projects?

Posted by James King on May 31, 2011

Its amazing what a small group of motivated people can achieve when given the chance.

It is also amazing how many project managers launch into planning and running their projects without thinking about how to motivate the people delivering the project and then struggle against the tide to try and deliver the work they planned.

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Creating a basic communication plan

Posted by James King on April 22, 2011

The world’s simplest communication plan might be this one:

  • Who I am communicating with?
  • What should I be telling them?
  • How should I communicate with them?

Even thinking about those three questions on the bus on your way to work might help create better communication. But I thought I would break the questions down to come up with a slightly more complex plan that is still not hard to do.

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Posted in Implementation, Leading change | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

 
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