Welcome to the December edition of Streamline. In November, the PPM world has been particularly taken with Annie Duke's latest book, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away.
What caught our attention in November
Managers need a strong team member acting as a number two. A strong number 2 must be better than you in enough areas to complete you. In addition to being your "go-to" person, they set the tone in your team's culture and help maintain a high level of performance. (4 min read)
Communicating your strategic roadmap well is just as important as building it. Noa Ganot offers an eight part template to help you tell the story of your roadmap in a way that people can understand (and yes, it's the one she presented in our recent workshop on How to Build a Strategic Roadmap (8 minute read)
You don’t always need large volumes of labeled data to train AI systems based on neural networks. When using some recent techniques, it’s often possible to build a good AI model with a fraction of the labeled data that might otherwise be needed. (17 min read)
Your team does not need you to be the hero. Too many leaders instinctively try to fix a crisis themselves. A U.S. Army colonel explains how to curb this tendency in yourself and allow your teams to flourish. (7 min read)
Planning and plans are two equally important but different things. Planning is an art, a verb and creates value. Plans are an artefact, a noun and are useful in a moment. It's important to know the difference. (7 min read)
Applying a systems approach to innovation can yield remarkable results. Maersk, the global shipping giant, created an innovation center in 2021 and its results show how a systems approach can bring clarity, resilience and scalability. (8 min read)
Different teams can use the same Scrum Events, Sprint Planning and Daily Scrum but get vastly different results. In this unusual take on "The Nightmare Before Christmas", Fredrik Carleson demonstrates how mindset can drastically alter the effectiveness of Scrum. (9 min read)
You need to be careful about what extra work you agree to take on. And to learn to say "no" 1) When your primary job responsibilities will suffer. 2) When it’s someone else’s work. 3) When there’s no clear exit strategy. or 4) When the ask is unreasonable. (5 min read)
The reason a project comes together is because of project integration management. This is what project managers do all day, every day, even if they don’t know it. Their role is to be the glue that holds the project together.(10 min read)
Sunken cost fallacy and tackling the easiest deliverable first are a deadly combination. Regardless of which lifecycle methodology you are using for your project, early de-risking is key for knowing when to walk away. (2 min read)
That’s your responsibility as a person, as a human being — to constantly be updating your positions on as many things as possible. And if you don’t contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you’re not thinking.
