Testing is often the ugly step sister of IT.  So it is often marginalized and sometimes forgotten. Lately I have seen the opposite effect and that scares me as much as the other.  One of the indicators is in communicating what testing is required.  For me this is the dr

Surprise, no CoffeeCAST today as I am off on holidays.  So I thought I would cobble something different together. I have had the great fortune to be working with some great guys on a bunch of projects over the last 9 months.  Somewhere along the line in a late night session I played a

I remembered this ad as it came out when I was at EDS and I loved the premise.  As a small business, we are really trying to both be the squirrels as well as help our customers be more nimble. The irony was about the fact that EDS was also one of the big beasts as they referred t

I have been working on an Enterprise upgrade project for the past 8 weeks and working to leverage the rapid results approach to try and move this faster. Throughout the project Graham has heard of me referring to this as herding cats.  When I was at EDS, they ran an ad campaign t

I had the good fortune tonight to run into a great post over on Joel Spolsky where he is talking about the impact in really any situation where you are heads down focused on a goal and someone comes and interrupts you to ask a question or maybe you get sidelined onto a short lived ini

In any change initiative there are many barriers, most fall into these four resistances/barriers: Psychcological Structural Cultural Political One of the objectives of a Rapid Results program is to address these resistances or barriers and create an environment that is empowered to wo

Welcome to the 35th CoffeeCAST with Stephen Hayward of Project X. I have put together a smaller show after some reflection on some projects I have been involved with over the pas little while.  I hope you will join in with your thoughts and give me your perspective . Today I will disc

In discussions about Rapid Results it is crucial to change your thinking from activities to results.  This does not mean that to get to our results we will not have activities, but we need to change our motivation to align to the results not the activities.  It is also impor

Welcome to the 34th CoffeeCAST with Stephen Hayward of Project X.  Boo Scary, it is Halloween and along comes with it a bit of Magic in the air.  Today I grabbed Graham as he has been pretty jazzed since finally getting to see the Gartner Magic Quadrant and I wanted to talk a bit abou

Earlier this week I talked about the value of process.  But what happens when the steps kill the project. This is where experience is crucial.  Being able to be comfortable and understanding the process you are working to follow allows you to be able to identify when a step