Leadership

Tips on being a better leader and creating great leaders within the organization.

The Early Problem Problem

Jim Highsmith | Aug 4, 2009 2 Responses

Aug 042009

One of the touted benefits of agile development is better early information on project problems and issues. This early detection enables management — project and otherwise — to take adaptive actions. However, early problem detection comes with its own problem — discomfort with early information. In waterfall projects management and staff are used to getting information about problems late. This leads to a perception that projects are typically on-track until late in the lifecycle. In fact, the lack of working software until late in the project provides a false sense of progress. Because coding and testing come late in waterfall projects, they “appear” to be in good shape — until the end when the project …

What’s New in the 2nd Edition of “Agile Project Management”

Jim Highsmith | Jul 27, 2009 3 Responses

Jul 272009

Agile Project Management, 2nd Edition, July 2009. by Jim Highsmith. Listen to a podcast interview with Israel Gat and Michael Cote later this week at http://theagileexecutive.com/. The new edition: Focuses on fundamentals of Agile project management, plus a new emphasis on issues impacting enterprise agility. Includes a new chapter Beyond Scope, Schedule, and Cost: Measuring Agile Performance. The Agile Triangle: Value, Quality, Constraints; what quality is and why it is important; outcome performance metrics; output performance metrics; shortening-the-tail. Revises agile values and concepts chapters to reflect three agile management values: Delivering Value over meeting Constraints (Value over Constraints), Leading the Team over managing Tasks (Team over Tasks), Adapting to change over Conforming to plans (Adapting …

Are You Justifying IT … Again?

Mike Rosen | Jul 16, 2009 1 Response

Jul 162009

I try to keep up with what’s going on in the industry by reading magazines, articles, blogs, and so on. Perhaps it’s the economy, or just coincidence, but in the past few months, there seem to have been more than enough articles about the impotence of IT. One editorial in Information Week quoted a survey that asked IT professionals to rank 10 items that would contribute to improving their job productivity. Top items were: Better guidance from business leaders on the most important processes, measures, and metrics. A clearer sense of corporate strategy from top executives. More support from top executives to implement policies and procedures companywide. More money and more staff ranked at the …

Closing the Toxic Leadership Gap

Vince Kellen | Jul 4, 2009 2 Responses

Jul 042009

“You can lead an organization through persuasion or formal edict. I have never found the arbitrary use of authority to control an organization either effective or, for that matter, personally interesting. If you cannot persuade your colleagues of the correctness of your decision, it is probably worthwhile to rethink your own.” – Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board In order to build knowledge organizations that are both enduring and of the highest performance each employee has to be maximally connected to their passion and placed in the right role. Doing this requires expertise in eliciting and assessing employees’ passion for their work as well as being able to fully understand the complexities …

It Won’t Be Déjà Vu

Anne Mullaney | Jun 22, 2009 No Responses

Jun 222009

Last December, we asked the Cutter Business Technology Council to provide some advice for surviving the recession. Since there are now some signs that things are beginning to turn around, we thought it would be interesting to see what the Council thinks will be different as we emerge from the recession. The consensus: Post-recovery ? Pre-crash. Here are a few impressions of the future: Tom DeMarco predicts: “In organizations whose decision makers are fear-crazed and vision-free, new IT expenditures will have to be justified largely on offset maintenance cost. Companies that pursue this course will be the best takeover targets in the coming years. Companies that are best at resisting this course will be the ones …

No Training … At What Cost?

Anne Mullaney | Mar 5, 2009 2 Responses

Mar 052009

Funny how some days everything you look at seems related. This morning I was catching up on my Cutter reading list. I was sucked in by Steve Andriole’s recent Business-IT Strategies Advisor, “The Subtle, the Sublime, and the Nefarious: What We Don’t See Sometimes Tells Us.” It’s a short piece on reading between the lines. In his usual no-holds-barred style, Steve decodes the messages that are circulating around many organizations. Here’s what he wrote about training budgets being cut: Training to Obsolescence When management stops training the troops, we should step back and wonder why — really. Usually they say something about saving money, especially in these times: “We’d love to train everyone on the …

Reinventing McDonald’s, Again

Robert Charette | Feb 18, 2009 No Responses

Feb 182009

I am sitting here, sipping my free cup of coffee at McDonald’s, looking across the parking lot at the huge going-out-of-business banners strung across the entrance to my local Circuit City store. “I wonder,” I joke with the McDonald’s manager, who I know pretty well, “if they had to pay for those banners up front and in cash?” A couple of years ago, I wrote about Circuit City’s inability to manage its enterprise risks: I wouldn’t be surprised to see the company sold in a few years, or at the very least, its top management replaced. At the time I wrote that Circuit City had decided that it would replace its higher-paid employees with lower-paid …

Cutter Fellows’ Advice for Surviving the Recession

Anne Mullaney | Dec 18, 2008 4 Responses

Dec 182008

The unraveling global economy and its effect on our companies and our lives is about the only thing on people’s minds these days. So we asked the Cutter Business Technology Council Fellows for their advice to IT leaders about how to survive during this financial mess. Here are some snippets of what they advised. Tom DeMarco: “Take a deep breath and … reduce salaries. There is an unwritten law in companies that salaries can go up but can never go down. Repeal it. If you’re faced with a mandate to cut personnel costs by, say, 10%, you could do that by laying off 10% of staff. That way all of the pain is absorbed by …

IT-Enabled Synchronous Psychosis?

Vince Kellen | Nov 21, 2008 4 Responses

Nov 212008

Is information technology accelerating the wild swings in the market? Oil barrel prices, thought to cross over $200 are now around $50. The stock market jitters 5% – 7% in a day looking like warmed-up jello. The talking heads on TV are talking with more emotion and I can see their veins popping on my high definition TV. Watching the stock market, I get the sense we are behaving like a large flock of birds. At the first sign of any perceived threat and the lead bird takes off and the whole flock blindly follows. The whole world is joined together in a synchronous flow of information, made possible via the information technology of the past …

Assessing Obama’s IT Promises

Robert Charette | Nov 17, 2008 No Responses

Nov 172008

For the IT community, the incoming US administration could be a very interesting one. President-elect Barack Obama is going to be the US’s first tech-savvy president who understands the power of the Internet. It is obviously overstated, but some political observers, such as Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, claimed that, “Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president. Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not have been the nominee.” During the campaign, President-elect Obama made several wide-ranging promises in regard to technology. For instance, he promised to protect the openness of the Internet by strongly supporting the principle of Net neutrality; he promised to deploy a …

Page 3 of 5«1 234 5 »

Avatars by Sterling Adventures

About the Blog

The Cutter Blog is an offshoot of Cutter Consortium, a boutique IT and Business Strategy consulting firm located in Boston, MA. Cutter's worldwide network of consultants offers clients analysis of the lastest industry trends, customized consulting and executive education opportunities.

Offering more than just a quick fix -- our size and focus allows us to "get deep" into the challenges faced by our clients so we can provide real and lasting solutions. Want to know more? Visit www.cutter.com.

Recent Tweets

The tragedy of my DNA: writing the due diligence report with @shassinger was easier than preparing my expense report... #vc #CutterIT 4 hours ago
In addition to presenting Agile 2.0 in #pathtoagility, I will expand the topic in Agile Roots http://t.co/wknfBj8L. #agile #CutterIT 14 hours ago
Big Agile is “agile as far as the eye can see," according to @jheintz. It is not “one Big Agile organization.” http://t.co/32Mb14h4 15 hours ago
Our Mike Rosen on stellar business architecture panel http://t.co/4y4zF8Tm @IRMUK #EA Conf 2012, London 18-20 June #entarch 15 hours ago

Category

Leadership

The Early Problem Problem

What’s New in the 2nd Edition of “Agile Project Management”

Are You Justifying IT … Again?

Closing the Toxic Leadership Gap

It Won’t Be Déjà Vu

No Training … At What Cost?

Reinventing McDonald’s, Again

Cutter Fellows’ Advice for Surviving the Recession

IT-Enabled Synchronous Psychosis?

Assessing Obama’s IT Promises

Blog Authors

Follow Us

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Categories

About the Blog

Recent Tweets

In Our Bookstore