I was involved in a huge systems development project a while ago that was a disaster.  I will describe the project and try to analyse why a strong believer in the breakthough approach abandoned it completely. Description of the Problem A large intergrated steel mill was producing

In the film Jerry McGuire the main character works for a very successful company.  One weekend he writes a manifesto on how the company could be better.  He discusses how customers should be treated.  He suggests improvements to processes and attitudes.  There is n

The key ingredient we all have is time.  Everybody would like more time.  However we were all given twenty-four hours in every day.  No more, no less.  It really is key how we use the time. As consultants our key revenue generator is our time.  How we use our

Welcome to the 14th Episode of the CoffeeCAST with Stephen Hayward of Project X. This week we are podcasting from the Bloor and Jarvis having just finished a Senge Circle meeting.  I still have most of my Starbucks Venti red-eye and Mark has a new cup of tea.  Mark Dymond of IBM is ba

Often people want and know what kind of improvements are needed to improve a part of the operation.  By creating teams with the authority to make changes, amazing results can be achieved.  Why don’t we listen to the people who do the work?  Often we are too busy t

Welcome to the 13th Episode of the CoffeeCAST with Stephen Hayward of Project X. Today we have the opportunity to chat with two people, Robert Shaffer of Robert H. Shaffer and Associates and Jim Hayward of Project X.  Jim and Bob have known each other for a while and when Jim and I st

One of the things that became very obvious listening to Claudia Imhoff (Co-founder and President of Intelligent Solutions, Inc.), Stephen Brobst (CTO, Teradata) and Bill O’Connor (Distinguished Engineer, Business Intelligence CTO, IBM) was the use of reference architectures to h

Welcome to the 12th Episode of Coffee Conversations (now to be called CoffeeCAST) with Stephen Hayward of Project X. This week we are podcasting from the Starbucks at Bayview with Michael Ianni-Palarchio (MIP) where we decided to have a spontaneous CoffeeCAST on a variety of subjects.

In last weeks Think Big DW Conference 2006, Stephen Brobst the CTO at Teradata gave a talk on The Sins of Denormalization.  It was a great little chat with the audience.  In the talk he discussed the Data Model.  Before I start, I thought I would jump on Wikipedia to ge

Many years ago, I read an article Advice to Internal & External Consultants: Expand Your Client’s Capacity to Use Your Help, Robert H. Schaffer, Advanced Management Journal, Autumn 1976. Early in the article Bob talks about how much potential is lost to make business perform bette