kpmrd blog

Earlier in my consulting career, when arriving at a customer with one of my Directors to give a presentation, he stopped me and asked me "where are you going to sit?". We were in the days before projectors or screens, so I was going to be running from handouts. I hadn't given it much thought before then, but he gave me advice on where to sit. I think about it always now. Nowadays, I prefer to sit on the opposite side of the table from the door, towards a corner of the table facing down towards the presenter and the screen. And yes, you need to be in the room on time or early to choose. This article made me think of it:  Where to sit in a meeting ,  Joseph Crepaldi ,  LinkedIn.

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...

I have this habit of flying to and from Helsinki from Stockholm. The return flight from Helsinki is one of these interesting 'takes no time' flights - it takes an hour, and the timezone difference is an hour. At the start of the flight, the flight attendant tells you how long the flight will take - and says it will take fourty minutes. Then, when you 'leave' on time, and land fourty minutes later, they announce that you've 'arrived' ahead of schedule; as the flight was sold as taking sixty minutes. Some observations: What is the defined 'leaving' time. When the plane pushes back, I suppose. Not when it leaves the tarmac? What is the defined 'arrival' time? When the plane touches down, it would seem. Not when it parks at the gate, or when you disembark. I think those measurement points are subjective. What I'm really interested in is the point in time I need to be at the airport, and the point in time that I walk out of the oth...

I consume a reasonable amount of tat on the internet. Some of it makes me smile, some of it makes me wince, and some of it makes me think "that's quite interesting". I thought I'd note some of the more interesting things I've learnt this week. Most of it nothing at all to do with my line of work. Five things I learnt this week from the internet. Tigers I've learnt that tigers get quite a bad deal. I'm no expert on this area, but it's something I've heard before. I suspect it's not just tigers getting a raw deal. To be fair, the article I stumbled across didn't really explain much about why or how tigers get a bad deal, but it showed a few pictures from Steve Winter , who has taken photographs for National Geographic in his career. Fortunately not all blood and guts; more food for thought in a couple of them. Article: The Tragic Story of the Majestic Tiger . The links through give more detail on the story. Space I've learnt w...

There are lots of arcticles floating around the internet about how one can work smarter, get things done, have more fun doing them. Often I read them and think, "well, er yes, of course". Sometimes I read them and think "you're just having a laugh if you think that will work" - which notionally, it must be said, is a usual response to change, but still. However, I read this one, albeit with a fairly standard title, but it had some interesting ideas on how to get things done (and I don't mean, Get Things Done). Article " What Successful People Do With The First Hour Of Their Work Day " on Fast Company , by Kevin Purdy .

Here's an interesting article on the BBC about using flattery to get what you need in a business context - Superflattery: The art of getting what you want , by Lucy Kellaway from the Financial Times. In the article, the psychology of persuasion through flattery is discussed, and some hints presented on how to use it to persuade someone to do something you want that they don't necessarily want to do.