Benefits Realisation: Tracking Value After the Project Closes
May 21, 2023 · 3 min read
Projects are funded to deliver benefits, not outputs. But most organisations stop measuring after go-live, leaving business cases that are never validated and lessons that are never learned. Benefits realisation management extends accountability beyond delivery: defining what will change and for whom before the project starts, assigning benefit owners in the business, and tracking actuals at three, six, and twelve months post-go-live.
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S&OP: Why Sales and Operations Planning Is Worth Getting Right
May 20, 2023 · 3 min read
Sales and Operations Planning is a monthly management process that aligns demand forecasts, supply capacity, and financial plans across the business. When it works, S&OP prevents the costly surprises that come from demand and supply teams operating in isolation — stockouts, excess inventory, missed revenue, and margin erosion. When it fails, it is almost always because demand and supply teams do not trust each other's data, finance is not integrated, or executives do not treat the process seriously enough to attend.
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Lean Six Sigma in Professional Services: Improving Delivery and Client Experience
May 19, 2023 · 3 min read
Professional services firms — consulting, legal, accounting, engineering — are knowledge-intensive organisations that have historically resisted process standardisation. Lean Six Sigma offers a way through that resistance by reframing quality as client value delivered on time and waste as non-billable rework and waiting. The payoff shows up in proposal-to-contract cycle time, engagement onboarding, deliverable review cycles, billing accuracy, staff utilisation, and client satisfaction.
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Event-Driven Architecture and Scrum: Building Loosely Coupled Systems
May 18, 2023 · 4 min read
Event-driven architecture decouples system components by replacing direct API calls with events. Scrum teams that adopt EDA gain scalability and resilience — but they need new practices to manage the complexity.
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Earned Value Management: The Numbers That Tell You Where a Project Really Is
May 17, 2023 · 4 min read
Earned Value Management integrates scope, schedule, and cost data to give an objective view of project health. Here is how to use it — including on projects without a dedicated EVM system.
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Contract Lifecycle Management: Getting Control of Your Agreements
May 16, 2023 · 4 min read
Most organisations have hundreds or thousands of active contracts but no systematic way to manage them. Poor contract lifecycle management costs money, creates risk, and erodes supplier relationships. Here is how to fix it.
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Lean Six Sigma in Insurance: Reducing Claims Cycle Time and Rework
May 15, 2023 · 4 min read
Insurance operations run on high-volume, standardised transactions — and that makes them ideal territory for Lean Six Sigma. Here is how LSS applies to claims, underwriting, and contact centre work.
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Wardley Mapping for Product Teams: Seeing the Landscape Your Scrum Team Operates In
May 14, 2023 · 4 min read
Scrum gives teams a powerful engine for execution. Wardley Maps give them a map of the territory. Without the map, even the most disciplined Scrum team can sprint efficiently in the wrong direction.
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The Critical Path: Understanding What Actually Drives Your Schedule
May 13, 2023 · 4 min read
The critical path is the single most important concept in project scheduling. Understanding it precisely — not just in theory but in the context of your actual project — is the difference between a schedule you can manage and one that manages you.
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Port Congestion and Supply Chain Resilience: Lessons from 2021–2022
May 12, 2023 · 4 min read
The port congestion crisis of 2021–2022 was the most visible supply chain disruption in a generation. Companies that emerged with less damage shared a set of structural choices made well before container ships began anchoring off Long Beach.
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Kaizen Events: Running a Week That Actually Changes Things
May 11, 2023 · 4 min read
A well-run kaizen event can accomplish in five days what a standing improvement committee might debate for six months. Here is how to prepare, run, and sustain a kaizen blitz that delivers real results.
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Continuous Discovery: How Product Teams Stay Close to Users
May 10, 2023 · 6 min read
Continuous discovery is the practice of regularly talking to customers throughout the product development cycle — not just at the start. Teresa Torres's opportunity solution tree provides a visual structure for connecting outcomes to opportunities, solutions, and experiments. Integrating discovery into Scrum as a team commitment — weekly customer interviews, assumption mapping, and experiment backlogs — prevents the most common failure mode: one big round of research at the start, then months of heads-down building with no further customer contact.
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