Insights
Practical guidance on capital projects, governance, financing, and delivery for Indigenous and public-sector leaders.
Project managers are accountable for outcomes they rarely have the authority to command. The work gets done through people who report to someone else, have competing priorities, and can reasonably say no. Understanding how influence actually works — and what to do when it fails — is the core practical skill of the project management profession.
Read more →Supply chain finance is a set of financial instruments that optimise cash flow between buyers and suppliers — without changing the underlying commercial terms. When deployed well, SCF allows buyers to extend days payable outstanding while actually improving supplier cash flow. Understanding when it helps, when it obscures, and when it creates systemic risk is essential for any procurement or treasury professional.
Read more →Retail is a high-volume, thin-margin environment where small process improvements compound rapidly. Lean Six Sigma offers retailers a disciplined path to reducing waste and variation in the processes that matter most to customers — from inventory accuracy to checkout speed to the experience of returning a purchase.
Read more →Platform engineering is one of the fastest-growing disciplines in modern software organisations. By building internal developer platforms that product teams use to self-serve infrastructure, deployment, and tooling, platform teams reduce cognitive load, accelerate time-to-production, and improve reliability at scale. Understanding how Scrum works for a platform team — rather than a product team — unlocks the full potential of the model.
Read more →The most common failure mode in transformation projects is not technical — it is human. A system that no one uses effectively, a process that no one follows, an organisation that reverts to old habits within months of go-live: these are change management failures, not delivery failures. Integrating OCM into the project life cycle is the difference between projects that deliver outputs and projects that deliver outcomes.
Read more →Category management treats procurement spend as a portfolio, grouping related purchases into categories and managing each strategically. For organisations that have been buying commodity-by-commodity, the shift unlocks significant and sustained savings — along with supply chain resilience that transactional buying can never deliver.
Read more →The original seven wastes of Lean were conceived on the factory floor, but a growing body of practice has extended the list — first to eight, and now to nine. The ninth waste is environmental waste, and it may be the most consequential of all.
Read more →Scrum anti-patterns are practices that look like Scrum but undermine the outcomes Scrum is designed to produce. They are insidious because they are usually adopted with good intentions — as workarounds for real constraints — and because they can persist for months before their cost becomes visible.
Read more →Project closure is the phase most frequently abbreviated, rushed, or skipped entirely. The team is tired, the sponsor has moved on, and resources have already been reassigned. What is lost is real: lessons learned, knowledge transfer, formal acceptance, contract closure, and the motivation of the team that will deliver the next project.
Read more →Most organisations have more procurement data than they know what to do with — spread across ERP systems, purchasing cards, contract repositories, and supplier invoices. Spend analytics is the discipline of consolidating, cleansing, classifying, and enriching that data to turn it into decisions: which categories to address, which suppliers to challenge, and where the organisation is leaving value on the table.
Read more →VOC — the Voice of the Customer — is the cornerstone of the DMAIC Define phase. Understanding what customers actually need, as distinct from what they say they need and what they have not yet thought to ask for, is the difference between improving the wrong thing and solving the right problem.
Read more →Observability — the ability to understand what is happening inside a system from its external outputs — belongs in the Definition of Done. If you cannot observe it, you cannot support or improve it.
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