Author Archives | Liza Wood

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After a dozen years leading video game development projects in a variety of roles, I decided to pursue a Master of Data Science at the University of British Columbia. Studying data science doesn’t mean I’m moving away from leading people. Growing data science teams need collaborative, pragmatic, Agile leadership to connect data to all areas of the business. I would like to share that point of view, along with my experiences, on this blog.

Be Inspiring

November 17, 2011

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Be inspiring

Over a year ago, I asked my team to brainstorm some ideas on what each and every person on the team could do to be inspiring to the people around them on a daily basis.   It is important to me that my teams work to rise above the day-to-day grind and that we be the […]

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Why My Team Likes Performance Evaluations

November 7, 2011

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It’s performance evaluation season at my company and I have been working long hours to get all of them done.  I have read a lot of articles that are strongly against performance evaluations because of the damage they can do to individual motivation and team dynamics. Having been the recipient of demotivating evaluations (even though […]

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Agile And PMI: It Is Not A Competition

October 31, 2011

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A few months ago, I decided to embrace reality.  I decided to volunteer for the Community Editorial Board for Project Management Institute (PMI) Agile Community of Practice.   While I have been a member of the PMI for many years, I never pursued my project management certification (PMP).  I work in one of the few industries […]

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Playing Your Zone

October 23, 2011

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Playing your zone

Have you ever walked away from a meeting thinking you had just witnessed a thing of beauty?  It does not happen to me very often, but I was fortunate enough to witness that twice this year.

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The Root Of All Evil

October 9, 2011

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Many people I have worked with over the years have tried to tell me what the biggest problem was with whatever company we were working for. No company is perfect; there is always some sort of organizational friction. Technical people thought it was because we didn’t have the latest tools or equipment. The creative types […]

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Taking An Agile Project To The Next Level

September 30, 2011

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For the past three months, I have been working closely with one project to improve their production management processes. They were already working with a basic implementation of Agile project management with Scrum, but they reached a stage in the project where they needed to take what they were doing to the next level. The […]

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