Does this seem familiar? Months before a deadline, the team is relaxed and responds to problems with: “Don’t worry!  We’ve got months to deal with that!”  As months turn into weeks, issues get addressed along the way, but some of the really hard problems continue to hang around. Finally, when the deadline is days away, […]

At the beginning of the innovation funnel, concept development is the most creative and exciting stage of new product development.  As discussed in one of my early blog posts, it is critical to have an understanding of what the product will be before rushing off and trying to build it.  But what do you do […]

The following comment was submitted on one of my blog articles. It’s quite a rant about Agile, so I thought it was worth addressing as a full post. Agile is not always implemented in a good way or at the point in the life of an application/product where it can be useful and not disruptive. […]

A real conversation I had two weeks ago: Executive: “What project management method do you use?  Please don’t tell me it’s Scrum.” Me: “Actually, we are Agile and use Scrum.” Executive: “Oh, no! I have seen so many Scrum projects go bad!” Other Executive: “Well, this is more of a hybrid project…” Me: “We could […]

Have you ever felt that your to-do list was longer than what you can possibly get done?  Or your product had a ton of features that need to be developed but it still needs to be shipped way too soon?   We often respond to this pressure by trying to do more, often at the same […]

When converting to Scrum or other Agile techniques, managers often wonder whether it will really improve productivity.  The whole process seems chaotic, so how can teams be more productive than traditional project management and development practices? This is the story of three teams in the same department and how we were able to measure their […]