Archive for the ‘Leading change’ Category
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: leadership, matrix structure, performance agreement, tester | Leave a Comment »
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: succession planning. people leadership | 2 Comments »
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: agile, managing ideas, project charter, project launch | 5 Comments »
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: agile certification | 4 Comments »
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: motivating project teams | Leave a Comment »
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: motivation, projects | Leave a Comment »
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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Posted in Leading change | Tagged: motivating project teams | Leave a Comment »
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: commucation plan | Leave a Comment »
Posted by James King on February 5, 2011
Many great ideas fall on deaf ears. So organisations bring in project managers to make sure we implement good ideas properly.
Good project managers define and clarify the idea, break the idea into features and then deploy the features into production. But quite often, people just don’t make use of the shiny new features they have been given.
Which is another way of saying that the great idea fell on deaf ears. So some organisations bring in change managers (and trainers and technical writers) to make sure people understand the new idea.
Good change managers make sure that the project is visible to stakeholders, supported by the important stakeholders and that the features being deployed are explained properly to the users. But quite often, the users go back to their old ways after a week, or they complain about the new features and the “stupid” projects that created them.
Which is another way of saying that the great idea fell on deaf ears. So what goes wrong? Why do so many good ideas fail to get adopted?
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Posted in Decisions, Idea management, Leading change, Reflection | Tagged: change management, ideas | Leave a Comment »
Posted by James King on February 2, 2011
To really understand any team, it is important to understand the distribution of power within the group and how that power is exercised.
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Posted in Implementation, Investigation, Leading change | Tagged: change management, politics, power, teams, tribes | Leave a Comment »
