When you really think hard about it, everything we do of any relevance is a project. With the exception of repetitive processes, e.g. bookkeeping, whether it’s creating something from scratch, manufacturing a product, on-boarding a new employee or pitching to a new customer, all these activities require resources with certain competencies to carry out tasks that […]
How Can We Solve the Urgent Crisis in Project Management?
How many things in our lives are affected by poor project management? We probably can’t even imagine. Time, resources and money are wasted every day around the globe when projects fail to deliver. When it comes to IT, this is an urgent problem. Our lives depend increasingly on software and digitalization is causing that dependence […]
The Risk of Not Working to a Goal Plan? Just Filling Your Time
No matter how busy we may be doing stuff during the day, that “busyness” is not necessarily a measure of progress. In fact, if we haven’t established a goal plan for our work for the year, quarter, month or day, then we really don’t know what we’re doing or why. Unless, of course, our goal […]
The Stories We Tell About Ourselves – Narrative and Trust
There’s a lot of talk about narrative these days. In fact, we all tell stories all the time – from what we communicate to customers about our brand, goods and services to the voice inside our head that is constantly “telling” us who we are (hopefully, not too many voices at one time.) So do we […]
Simplify Your Hierarchy For Speed and Reliability
Let’s make a radical statement about success and organizations: all that matters for the success of an organization and those who work within it is speed and reliability. Think about that for a second. How many organizations can actually say that they are designed for this? Isn’t it true that layers of bureaucracy and the […]
Procrastination – Don’t Let it Bite
Procrastination is one of the greatest enemies of productivity and can play havoc with project management. On top of that, it can chip away at self-esteem. How can we help ourselves and others to overcome something so insidious and yet so common? Can’t Do Won’t Do? One of the reasons for procrastination is reasonably simple […]
Fear in the Workplace – How to Drive it Out
Most organizations were created and are still managed by people whose cognitive skills and careers have been formed in a pre-digital era. This means people that work in them are measured and managed by people who developed their careers according to the mindset and mechanisms of the pre-digital reality. How can we make sure that valuable […]
Enjoy the Process of Improvement- You Were Made For It
We talk a lot about processes at Intelligent Management. That’s because well-designed and well-managed processes are the bedrock of Quality and healthy organizations. But it’s more than that. Processes require constant attention and continuous improvement. In case that begins to sound like a treadmill, let’s remember something very important and fundamental for our lives: we can […]
Variation in Processes: The Time it Takes to Sell
Everything we do in an organization can be considered as a process. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: whether we realize it or not, every process is affected by variation. We need to understand and manage this phenomenon of variation in processes if we want to achieve the best results. Let’s look at […]
What Is Variation and Why Can’t Leaders and Managers Ignore It?
Asking somebody to lead or manage without knowledge of variation in our opinion is like asking them to sail a boat without a rudder. That’s an observation based on 20 years of working with organizations and witnessing the effects of managing (or not managing) variation. We’ve been asked to explain some more about variation following our post […]
