In times of uncertainty, a company’s strategy becomes even more important for your team. That’s why the beginning of a new year is the perfect time to reflect and think about your company’s future. Key Questions for Strategic Planning Strategic business planning helps answer three essential questions: Here Are Seven Steps to Developing a Strategy: […]
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Over the years, I’ve watched talented project managers get tripped up by one simple misunderstanding: they treat qualityand grade as if they’re the same thing. They aren’t. In my two decades managing IT projects in Silicon Valley, I’ve seen how this confusion can quietly derail delivery, damage stakeholder trust, and inflate costs. The PMBoK makes a clear distinction
Quality vs. Grade in Projects: Why the Difference Matters More Than You Think Read More »
What Do You Get When You Give Everyone a Blank Card? It turns out, you get some of the best ideas in the room. Long before virtual whiteboards, sprint retros, or AI brainstorming assistants, a man named Dr. C.C. Crawford—an American education researcher—developed a simple but powerful method for gathering ideas from a group: the slip
Crawford’s Slip Method: The Low-Tech Innovation Hack That Still Works in High-Tech Teams Read More »
I’ve managed projects inside cloud-native startups and enterprise giants, across product launches, system overhauls, regulatory initiatives, and digital transformations. They vary wildly in scope and complexity—but they all share the same foundational structure. Over the past two decades, I’ve come to believe that no matter where you are—New York or Nairobi, fintech or pharma, agile
W. Edwards Deming—widely regarded as the father of Total Quality Management (TQM)—never defined his philosophy with a single term. Instead, he introduced 14 management transformation principles, later synthesizing them into what he called the System of Profound Knowledge: essentially a magnifying glass and map to understand, enhance, and optimize organizational performance. Deming emphasized that this is a holistic system with
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Agile Works. Until It Doesn’t. I’ve been in tech long enough to remember when Agile was a team-level experiment. A scrappy engineering squad would ditch the waterfall Gantt chart, start doing standups, and ship faster than the rest of the org. Leadership would notice. They’d ask, “Can we do this across the company?” That’s when things got
Scaling Agile in Big Tech: Lessons from the Trenches Read More »
The Buzzword That Wasn’t Always It’s easy to forget, in a world where Agile is on every job description and whiteboard, that this methodology began as a manifesto—a rebellion, really—by 17 software developers tired of rigid, waterfall-style delivery cycles. That was 2001. What started as a series of ski-lodge conversations in Snowbird, Utah, would become a movement
The Agile Roots and Where It Fits Today: Lessons from Tech Frontlines Read More »
