Every month, a selection of the top PPM articles from around the Web.
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What an exciting month! Many interesing topics ranging from Agile board committees, strategic planning to risk and product management.
WHAT CAUGHT OUR ATTENTION THIS MONTH
Does your board need a business Agility committee? Actively engaging the board to guide (and drive) aspects of the transformation could help keep Agile transformations on track, and maintain continuity when senior executives and sponsors move over to other positions. (2 min read)
How to do strategic planning like a futurist. Futurists think about time differently: for any given uncertainty about the future — whether that's risk, opportunity, or growth — they tend to think in the short- and long-term simultaneously, and use a time cone (instead of linear timelines) that measures certainty and charts actions. (12 min read)
Efficiency is the enemy. Total efficiency is a myth, and any time we eliminate slack, we create a build-up of work. The irony is that we achieve far more in the long run when we have slack. We are more productive when we don't try to be productive all the time. (12 min read)
Managers need to help dispersed teams get better at failing fast. Research suggest that while dispersed teams, working remotely, are often more efficient than co-located teams at successfully completing projects, they also tend to persist with failing projects longer than than co-located teams. Better screening and planning of projects, more frequent synchronous working, and more managerial monitoring and intervention are three ways to help them learn to fail fast. (6 min read)
Is Scrum too difficult to understand? On the surface, it seems straightforward, but in reality, Scrum is disruptive. The misconception that it's easy leads to false expectations and disappointments. Ultimately, organizations end up with a half-baked version of Scrum that suits no one. (8 min read)
For successful change management, don't overlook role changes. Major transitions cause personal disruption along three different dimensions: role adjustment, task learning, and emotional engagement. But only one of them, the task-learning challenge, is usually acknowledged explicitly. (11 min read)
How to keep your team excited on long projects. Some projects are necessarily longer than others, and if they start too fast and drag on, the project manager may find themselves carrying all the load. Noa Ganot looks at three ways you can approach these projects to make them fun, engaging, and making an impact that is worth their effort. (7 min read)
Product management is risk management. Product development is inherently and fundamentally a risky endeavor: value risk, usability risk, feasibility risk and viability risk are the four most important ones. (5 min read)
Running experiments over time to reduce uncertainty in new business ideas is deceptively difficult to do. Understanding the principles of experiment flow is the first step to designing good experiments that yield useable insights. (3 min read)
The best ideas from the 2021 Global Infrastructure Initiative Summit. The capital project and infrastructure industry is at an inflection point. While infrastructure investment continues to be seen as a driver for multiple outcomes, sustainability, digitization, equity, and talent strategy have collectively moved to the top of the agenda. (2 min read)
A QUOTE THAT MADE US THINK
“How can you beat Usain Bolt in a race? All you need is for him to run in the wrong direction for five seconds."
— Wil Reynolds