kpmrd blog

There was some trouble on the train journey home today; somewhere between Stockholm Central and home there was an 'incident' on the track. I decided to stick it out, as these things usually clear before much fuss, but after sitting still for quite a while at one of the stations on the way, I decided to go back and take another route via the underground and two buses. It's quite a long way round. It made me think... what drives us to make these kind of decisions on which way to go? For me, it was taking an alternative that might be slower, but was at least getting me closer to where I wanted to be. Sitting still didn't seem to be achieving anything! I noticed on the travel app on the phone that everything seemed to clear up with the trains while I was on my alternative route. So which way was faster; did my gamble pay off? I don't know, and I'm not sure how I would find out. The only option would have been to put someone on the other route and race them -...

I'm doing some work at the moment on project tollgates. We use the DSDM Atern Framework for delivering our projects, and in a recent all day workshop one of the concerns that came up was the handover from the sales team to the delivery team. Not a major concern - I've seen some teams where the gap between what was sold and the reality of what can be done has been monstrous. Here, fortunately, not the case. However, this seems to be a recurring question. What has the salesman agreed? My approach to a project delivery methodology has always been that the first phase of a delivery project is fundamentally to address that - the delivery team need to take ownership of the project, and make their own commitments to what can and cannot be done and by when. Call it Inception, Foundations, Blueprint - the effect is still the same. Not the best way to present it to a customer, but actually, a customer should be able to see the value of this first phase also - it aligns everyone's...