Models for Change – Switch

The rider and the elephant – a model for change.  I am listening in my car to a book called Switch by the the Heath brothers. http://heathbrothers.com/switch/   I have found much of his stuff really compelling and surprising.  I really like his model for

Consulting and Systems Integration Firms – People Centric

Most good consulting companies marry a balance of people, process and technology to create a practice that meets and sometimes exceeds a client need.  This is a lovely motherhood statement.  But it forgets that the word consult means the bare use of people to listen, discu

Collaboration is More Than Just Talk

As most of you who follow our blog know, Project X's RapidBI Approach and Platform is linked and depends very much on Agile Development and Real Collaboration. The challenge with the word collaboration is that often it is just talk.  I have had the opportunity to work with s

How to Motivate People — Help

How can I get people to enter their golf scores into the handicap system?  I just read Drive by Dan Pink and would like to apply the ideas of Motivation 3.0 to my problem.  I would like this to be the beginning of a discussion about motivation.  Please comment. Pink

CoffeeCAST – #53 – BI Governance

Michael and I sat down after a great morning of review on lessons learned and wanted to quickly chat about Business Intelligence Governance. In today’s CoffeeCAST we talk about the main four areas of focus without going too deep on any one.  They are: BI Governance committee BI

KPI – Key Performance Indicators

KPI's are very important components of our strategy to monitor and report our organizational effectiveness.  Wikepedia has a great definition that links to the similar ideas of BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) and Scorecards. In context these often seem like very daunting

Food Preparation is like Data Warehousing

I have a good friend who is a chef.  Often we get together to share and discuss about each others business.  Just the other night over a beer he was telling me a story and I almost fell over at how much his story about managing change, kitchens, customers and so forth is s

Making Technology an Asset, Not a Liability

Is technology really providing value to your organization?  So often the business depends on the IT organization to deliver value rather than using technology to support the business to deliver value.  Often the project is proposed by IT and they promise value.

Change Management

Recently I was chatting with somebody who is involved in a project which involves a huge amount of change.  We were discussing the change management process and the assessment of readiness of an group to change.  I was recalling several process I have been involved with that

Whack a Mole Culture

I was reading an article about the danger of your hidden culture called "Executives Beware — Your Culture May Be Deadly by Peter De Lisi.  If you recall the kids game, when the mole sticks his head up out of the ground, you try to whack the mole.  In many organiza