Ackoff on Systems Thinking
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Dr. Russell Ackoff'sshort lecture on Systems Thinking is one of the best simple descriptions of the concept.
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Powers of Ten
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Powers of Ten takes us on an adventure in magnitudes. Starting at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, this famous film transports us to the outer edges of the universe. Every ten seconds we view the starting point from ten times farther out until our own galaxy is visible only a s a speck of light among many others.
Read MoreHow Long Does it Take to Get to Maturity Level 3?
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High performance teams reach Maturity Level 3 (ML3) in 3-4 months.
Read MoreWhat is the Maturity Level of your Team?
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Determining the process maturity level for you team using the FTTM System is critical in order to drive continuous improvement towards continuous schedule acceleration.
Read MoreBuilding Schedules Using the Practices of Fast Teams
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A summary of scheduling best practices.
Read MoreCoaching vs. Training: What's the difference?
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What’s the difference between training and coaching? We try to explain using an analogy.
Read MoreStart with Why
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Simon Sinek’s “Start with Why” concept works well to describe the three elements of a decisionAccelerator model.
Read MoreDoes "Reality Distortion" Work?
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The ongoing challenge when managing real innovation projects at the bleeding edge of technology is,“To improve the project planning and tracking system in order to better predict schedule performance.”
Read MoreRoot Causes of Poor FTTM Performance
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Our matrix organizes root causes of poor time-to-market performance. It is a result of our ongoing research and is a composite of our work in many different client environments.
Read MoreDo-it, Try-it, Fix-it Cycles of Learning
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Successful teams use the "do-it, try-it, fix-it" cycle. Slow teams typically spend long periods of time trying to "get it right" for fear of failing. Some corporate cultures tend to punish for failure rather than reward for success. They don't make the trade-off between long duration and that last 10% to make something "perfect." They default to getting it right over getting it done (soon). This model means that you had better be right at the end of the cycle. If you have to rework then this will take even more time.
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Process Reengineering
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Driven by corporations trying to do more with less, BPM is back. If you can’t grow, the only way to maintain and improve margins are to reduce costs. Like Hammer and Champy, we are doing it from a customer’s perspective. We believe that if you focus on the customer when improving process efficiency, you will by default save time and money. These are the byproducts of a customer efficient process. Lets look at our process, at a high level.
Read MoreStart with a Macro Plan
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A macro plan is a high-level description of a project. About 50 activities or less that define the overall work that needs to be done to achieve an objective.
Read MoreManage the Fuzzy Front End
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The "Fuzzy-Front-End" is the time at the beginning of the development cycle. It is the point in time when an idea is conceived to when a project is approved and a full team is formed. Don Reinertsen said that "fuzziness consumes time."
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Provisioning Host
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Understanding how organizations provision development teams (i.e. provide necessary people, funding, information, facilities, resources, knowledge, skills, etc.) has been a foundational practice in our research work.
Read MoreWhat is the Host?
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The “Host” is everything in an organization that is outside and around a team. The host can provision a team or it can interrupt it. Fast organizations design the host to "provide for" when resources, information, or "things" are needed by the team to be effective.
Read MoreDifferentiating Customer Needs from Product Features
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Often product functions or features are confused with customer needs. In our world a customer need (also called "customer requirement") is an attribute that expresses some part of problem a customer is trying to solve. A product feature is specifically how the customer's need will be fulfilled. A product feature is also called a "how."
Read MoreManaging Your Business During the Bad Times
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During a recession, it can be difficult to manage your business effectively when things are in a spiral. This post describes how to select which projects to keep given your constraints.
Read MoreIncrease Product Success
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Increase your new product success rate by finding the root causes of poor performance and translating these into selection criteria to pick better products (to develop). This process also uncovers issues that are causing the wrong products to be defined in the first place. Better failure analysis, i.e. why do some new products miss their targets?, can be translated into better new product selection criteria so that more good ideas get into the development pipeline than bad ones.
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