Yesterday I participated in a Dutch Agile Government Open Space meeting. The theme of this session was 'Agile & ICT Policy'. One of the speakers was Brigitte van den Burg. She is one of our Lower House representatives and within her party responsible for the Dutch...
Yesterday we had our seminar Lean & Agile IT. At this seminar we explained that Lean principles and Agile practices are complementary and can lead to better results. We not only applied these principles and practices to product development (like Scrum), but also...
I'm organizing a new seminar about creating a more effective IT organisation by using Lean & Agile principles. I'm very much looking forward to share our ideas and experiences. We'll be hosting this seminar on Thursday September the 15th at our Whitehorses head...
My latest whitebook is published today. It's a Dutch paper (original title: 'Meten is weten: betere IT resultaten met Lean Six Sigma DMAIC'). As usual I'll post an English translation soon. I'm trying to point out that sometimes it's better to stop theorizing and...
One of the more difficult aspects of managing projects is to find the right balance between spending time on accountability, reporting and control or spending time on getting things done (progress). Spending time on planning and reporting activities means that you and...
It has been a while since my last post. I've been very busy managing a demanding project. The good news is that I finally managed to create a decent Gantt Chart in Excel 2007. With that I do mean a Chart object in Excel, not just some manual tinkering with Excel...
The first answer to this question is.... 'quality build in'. The Toyota philosophy knows the concept of Poka-yoke, 'mistake proofing a device by preventing, correcting, or drawing attention to human errors as they occur'. Poka-yoke is a means of building quality into...
I've added two new 'cool videos' to the sidebar. How great leaders inspire action (presentation by Simon Sinek, TEDxPuget Sound, Sep 2009) A great and inspiring presentation about leadership. If you think this presentation is only about marketing and selling stuff,...
As we all know, projects are complex. That applies even more to ICT projects. The problem with complexity is that it creates unpredictability. We do not like unpredictability because both customer and supplier want to have a successful business case and need to know...
I promised an English translation of my presentation 'The Two Largest Project Killers', so here it is. It is my strong belief that if everything else fails, removing fear and complexity increases the odds for success substantially. The two largest project killers View...