As organizations and teams mature their agile practices they are often faced with new questions. Leaders might ask, “Can you tell me when the feature we prioritized will be done,” or “Can you share with me a list of features that are likely to be...
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September 28, 2018 Bruce Benson
Metrics
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Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) researchers found insights into ant cooperation could be incorporated into the development of large swarms of robots. The team first placed 30 ants into a container filled with glass soil-like particles, and observed only 30% of the ants performed...
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September 19, 2018 Bruce Benson
Team Management
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“I had two whiteboards filled up with questions left unanswered, tests left undone, and every other question we could think of,” Amber wrote on her Facebook page that day. Amber says that at one point during that meeting, she told the staff she felt like...
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September 13, 2018 Bruce Benson
Risk Management
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Many of you are familiar with the “technology adoption life cycle” model, long a pillar of everything from new tech product pitches to IPO roadshows. However, overuse has eroded the model’s impact. Today, it’s less an effective visualization of market traction, and more a symbol...
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August 29, 2018 Bruce Benson
Change Management
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I would have thought that a direct marketer who can’t make a high-teens annualized return over the longer term look very attractive wouldn’t be a very good marketer. The truth should suffice. Evidently, we’re in a world where the truth doesn’t always suffice. In one...
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August 25, 2018 Bruce Benson
Communication
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Instead of officially lowering its prices, Apple is in talks with retailers and banks to offer holiday deals all year round, according to people familiar with the plans. Those people say Apple is also asking some individual stores to more than quadruple sales targets, to...
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August 17, 2018 Bruce Benson
Communication
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Troy Magennis, an Agile consultant and founder of Focused Objectives who made a keynote presentation at the 2018 Agile conference in San Diego this week. According to Magennis, you can collect all the data in the world and make charts and dashboards, but if people...
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August 11, 2018 Bruce Benson
Metrics
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Although it is a user’s responsibility to inform themselves of a browser’s features by actually reading the disclosures, the authors assert that these texts need to be written better. They note that only “participants who saw the Chrome or [older version of the] Chrome disclosure...
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August 8, 2018 Bruce Benson
Communication
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Employees viewed Fadell — who’s known as the godfather of the iPod and played a key role in designing the iPhone — as a product visionary and leader. Fawaz, by contrast, was considered a business development manager, focused on efficiencies. … Another said he believes...
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July 23, 2018 Bruce Benson
Schedule
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At 6 am, analytical thinking was shown to peak, the words and language at this time were shown to correlate with a more logical way of thinking. However, in the evenings and nights this thinking style changed to a more emotional and existential one. University...
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July 18, 2018 Bruce Benson
Staffing
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The advent of the fiduciary rule led the industry to make changes that may not be reversed, according to Aron Szapiro, Morningstar Inc.’s director for policy research. After the Labor Department’s announcement in 2016, financial companies began moving to comply with it. Bank of America...
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July 10, 2018 Bruce Benson
Change Management
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Today’s workers don’t need some Big Brother figure hovering over us to tell us that budgets are cut, that we will be in big trouble if we don’t meet deadlines, and to “make do with less.” We need leaders who set us up for success,...
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July 4, 2018 Bruce Benson
Staffing
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Customers had extreme difficulty in installing and operating their System/360s. So, IBM established the role of “Systems Engineers” with the altruistic goal of helping customers making their installations and applications operational. The bug-laden software resulted in fix after fix, each fix reconciling some problems but...
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June 28, 2018 Bruce Benson
Innovation
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Yet Abt, on behalf of Carthage College, in Kenosha, Wis., has returns that beat Harvard ’s $37 billion endowment and most others. In the 10 years through the most recent college fiscal year, ended on June 30, 2017, the former beer company executive racked up...
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June 23, 2018 Bruce Benson
Process Improvement
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Drayton had a reputation as an around-the-clock worker, but one with a creative streak. “Much of what he did was very innovative and very controversial,” Gamse says. “A lot of times my first reaction would be, ‘This is crazy. This has no chance of happening!’...
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June 16, 2018 Bruce Benson
Innovation
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