Expert insights. Personalized for you.
A few weeks ago, I was for a three-day assessment training regarding the IPMA Project Excellence Model in Vilnius, Lithonia. For 3 days, by using action learning we familiarized ourselves with the Project Excellence Model. This model will be used to judge which large and mega-sized projects will receive the project excellence award. The Project Excellence Model (PEM) is described in the book Project Excellence Baseline for Achieving Excellence in Projects and Programmes. MORE
Agile Conversations – Transform Your Conversations, Transform your Culture , written by Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick could be one of the missing pieces to make your agile transition work. The book starts with some background information regarding the ideas and theories that underpin the conversational tools that will be used in the rest of the book. You get an explanation of the core techniques of the authors’ four R’s method. MORE
After nine years there is a new edition of the Managing Successful Programmes (MSP) guide. It’s a best practice so I assume the changes will be incremental and not a revolution. Good to see that the guide is 80 pages less (now 224 pages) and I really like the four scenario’s which are used to show what specific topics mean for the different scenarios. MORE
Happy to see my A new bird’s eye view on the agile forest article in the October edition of the Project Management World Journal (PMWJ). It’s less than a year ago when the first edition of this article won an award. At that moment it contained 50 agile ways of working. MORE
The book 97 Things Every Scrum Practitioner Should Know edited by Gunther Verheyen contains the wisdom of 69 practitioners around the world and helps you to improve your understanding of Scrum ( nb. Who are we missing on the cover of the book? ). Gunther organized these 97 essays around ten themes. These themes cover all aspects of Scrum and beyond. The events, the different roles, their behavior, the skills, collaboration and the artifacts. The book ends with a simple Scrum glossary. MORE
As a result of my book reviews in 2020, I created several Quick Reference Cards to summarize what I have read. MORE
If you want to make the transformation to a self-managing organization the book Moose heads on the table – Stories about self-managing organisations from Sweden by Karin Tenelius and Lisa Gill is a good starting point. MORE
2020 was again an extremely fruitful book review year. I wrote around 50 book reviews including 16 corresponding quick reference cards and several personal insights, and views on specific topics in the field of project, program and portfolio management. My own books, whitepapers and articles. MORE
The quest to find more trees for my agile forest continues. Structural Agility is again a way of working that fits in the culture targeted box of my The bird’s eye view on the agile forest overview and complements ‘frameworks’ like Scrum, SAFe, Less, disciplined Agile, et cetera. MORE
In the whitepaper Project Optimism Bias in Capital Investment Decision Making , the author Milvio DiBartolomeo brings us in the world of biases. The whitepaper is divided into four parts. MORE
Someone noticed me of Agile 2. If you look at the corresponding website, Agile 2 is positioned as the next iteration of agile. It’s still works in progress of a group of 15 authors. You can find their case for Agile 2. Why they think agile is deeply broken and that they want to fix it. MORE
Quite often you hear the words blockchain, bitcoin or cryptocurrency, but do you really know what is meant with those words? Tiana Laurence wrote the book Introduction to Blockchain Technology – The many faces of blockchain technology in the 21 st century to demystify these words. MORE
During training classes I often notice that students mix these words together. After reading this article I hope you understand the relationship between incremental and iterative development. I will start with a comparison of a waterfall and an agile approach by delivering a payment app. In the second part of this article, I position waterfall and agile in an incremental versus iterative cross or matrix and shows what happens in the other two quadrants too (will be part of a next blog post). MORE
Rethinking agile – Why agile teams have nothing to do with business agility written by Klaus Leopold is great book to cope with agile transformations and what you have to do to increase the chance of success. It definitely busted the myth that having agile teams makes you agile. The book is divided into four parts: the problem, the causes, the first solution, and the result. The book starts with a case study of an organization that wants to optimize their time-to-market. MORE
The book Engaging stakeholders on projects – How to harness people power , written by Elizabeth Harrin is the starting point if you want to get a better understanding of stakeholder engagement and it gives you a lot of practical advice, tips for improving practice key takeaways and action steps for successful stakeholder engagement. MORE
I just came across a new framework that could be positioned on the portfolio level of my Bird’s eye view on the agile forest. MORE
The 10X Growth Machine – How companies can innovate, scale and win , written by Misha de Sterke, is a book to build your own growth machine by using innovation as a means. It offers a very detailed description of a battle-tested methodology with a framework, a canvas, seven models and eleven tools. Creative destruction is accelerating. The average life expectancy for European and Japanese companies is 12.5 years and around 10% of all companies disappear each year. MORE
In the book Agile transformation – Structures, processes and mindsets for the digital age , the author Neil Perkin shows how to transform an organization to a new type of business for a new age and to become fit for purpose for both the present and the future. MORE
Just published the New bird’s eye view on the agile forest (PMWJ) and I can already make an adjustment (will it ever stop?). MORE
Introduction. This year was my first experience with the IPMA Global Excellence Award. I was already several times assessor and judge for the PMO of the world award. But those assessments are completely different. You watch on your own a one-hour presentation of a PMO. MORE
Michael K. Levine wrote with People Over Process – Leadership for Agility a very pragmatic and down to earth book about leadership and agile projects. The classic formulation of agile in the Agile Manifesto has no role for leadership. MORE
B eing a Project Manager – A different Book on Project Management by Hamutal Weisz and Daniel Zitter focuses on the essentials and practice of project management. . I love the process of baking bread as a metaphor for project management and all those related colorful pictures throughout the book. MORE
A few weeks ago, I received the latest report from the Standish Group – CHAOS 2020: Beyond Infinity – written by Jim Johnson. Every two years the Standish Group publish a new CHAOS Report. These reports include classic CHAOS data in different forms with many charts. MORE
Two weeks ago, I received a blurb request. “I I saw on your blog that you reviewed Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, and I’d like to ask whether you’d be willing to consider giving a blurb to a similar book”. MORE
One of the principles of the Agile Manifesto is “ Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential ”. Studies from the Standish Group and recorded in one of their Chaos reports shows that 60% of developed features are not or rarely used. If you only deliver the right features your customer will get the product much faster and cheaper. Looking at the features of the product you are developing is one way to take this principle into account. MORE
Many organizations are struggling with their business agility transformation. One of the reasons is the way they have organized their teams. The focus was probably on efficiency and if these teams start to use agile ways of working, this doesn’t make the organization agile. The book Team topologies – Organizing business and technology teams for fast flow , by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, will help you to design a team organization structure that helps you to become more agile. MORE
DevOps for the modern enterprise – winning practices to transform legacy IT organizations is a practical book based on the experience of the author Mirco Hering. The book is divided into three parts. The first part explains how to create the right ecosystem for success. The second part puts the people and organizational dimension in the spotlights and the last part emphasizes on technology and architecture aspects. MORE
If you look at the AgilePM (The DSDM Agile Project Framework) documentation set-up you could ask yourself if it’s not too much for an agile way of working? In AgilePM the following documents are described: Terms of Reference. Business Case. Prioritised Requirements List. Solution Architecture Definition. Development Approach Definition. Delivery Plan. Management Approach Definition. Feasibility Assessment. Foundation Summary. Evolving Solution. Timebox Plan. Timebox Review Record. MORE
Proud to see that the PM World Journal published a next article that I wrote together with Marisa Silva. As you might recall, last year we (Marisa Silva and myself) went on a safari to hunt the project creatures that could negatively impact a portfolio of projects [ Silva, M. and Portman, H. 2019). MORE
Last week I received a few copies of a brand new magazine from Vincent Snijder, the editor in chief. A magazine for the Blue Striped Frog community of professionals who are engaged in transformations towards increasing organizational agility. MORE
FLEKS is a Hybrid Project Management Model, which aims at providing a way to manage projects, develop products and deliver the highest possible value within the context of a project and its stakeholders. Businesses and projects are embedded in a complex and ever-changing environment. MORE
Yesterday, November 18th, there was a 3-hour virtual event to celebrate the launch of the 2020 Scrum Guide with nearly 20,000 registrants. I connected 15 minutes before the start but received a message that the limit of 1000 participants was reached, and I couldn’t participate. MORE
The Agile Fluency model, developed by Diana Larsen and James Shore in 2012 and substantially updated in 2018, is a framework to help teams understand their current position and to help them develop an individual road map. Agile teams pass through four distinct zones of fluency as they learn ( fluency evolves). Diana Larsen defines fluency as things that you do automatically without thinking. Each zone brings specific benefits: Focusing teams produce business value (agile fundamentals). MORE
AIPMO is developing the first ‘leading’ international PMO standard based on a combination of research findings and expert knowledge. Developing an international standard is big responsibility because it can create or destroy value depending on the content, how it is written and how the content is interpreted. For example, if an industry is in a mess and you standardize a mess, you keep it in a mess. MORE
Henny Portman
DECEMBER 12, 2020
The book Engaging stakeholders on projects – How to harness people power , written by Elizabeth Harrin is the starting point if you want to get a better understanding of stakeholder engagement and it gives you a lot of practical advice, tips for improving practice key takeaways and action steps for successful stakeholder engagement.
Henny Portman
JANUARY 19, 2021
FLEKS is a Hybrid Project Management Model, which aims at providing a way to manage projects, develop products and deliver the highest possible value within the context of a project and its stakeholders. Businesses and projects are embedded in a complex and ever-changing environment.
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Henny Portman
JANUARY 13, 2021
I just came across a new framework that could be positioned on the portfolio level of my Bird’s eye view on the agile forest.
Henny Portman
OCTOBER 28, 2020
B eing a Project Manager – A different Book on Project Management by Hamutal Weisz and Daniel Zitter focuses on the essentials and practice of project management. . I love the process of baking bread as a metaphor for project management and all those related colorful pictures throughout the book.
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Does your analytics solution work with your current tech stack and DevOps practices? If not, any update to the analytics could increase deployment complexity and become difficult to maintain. Learn the 5 elements of a DevOps-friendly embedded analytics solution.
Henny Portman
JANUARY 6, 2021
A few weeks ago, I received the latest report from the Standish Group – CHAOS 2020: Beyond Infinity – written by Jim Johnson. Every two years the Standish Group publish a new CHAOS Report. These reports include classic CHAOS data in different forms with many charts.
Henny Portman
OCTOBER 21, 2020
Someone noticed me of Agile 2. If you look at the corresponding website, Agile 2 is positioned as the next iteration of agile. It’s still works in progress of a group of 15 authors. You can find their case for Agile 2. Why they think agile is deeply broken and that they want to fix it.
Henny Portman
DECEMBER 28, 2020
2020 was again an extremely fruitful book review year. I wrote around 50 book reviews including 16 corresponding quick reference cards and several personal insights, and views on specific topics in the field of project, program and portfolio management. My own books, whitepapers and articles.
Henny Portman
OCTOBER 15, 2020
Just published the New bird’s eye view on the agile forest (PMWJ) and I can already make an adjustment (will it ever stop?).
Henny Portman
DECEMBER 28, 2020
As a result of my book reviews in 2020, I created several Quick Reference Cards to summarize what I have read.
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Embedding dashboards and reports aren’t enough. Futureproof your application by offering instant, actionable insights that will give you and your customers a competitive advantage.
Henny Portman
NOVEMBER 19, 2020
Yesterday, November 18th, there was a 3-hour virtual event to celebrate the launch of the 2020 Scrum Guide with nearly 20,000 registrants. I connected 15 minutes before the start but received a message that the limit of 1000 participants was reached, and I couldn’t participate.
Henny Portman
NOVEMBER 9, 2020
In the book Agile transformation – Structures, processes and mindsets for the digital age , the author Neil Perkin shows how to transform an organization to a new type of business for a new age and to become fit for purpose for both the present and the future.
Henny Portman
JULY 26, 2020
Michael K. Levine wrote with People Over Process – Leadership for Agility a very pragmatic and down to earth book about leadership and agile projects. The classic formulation of agile in the Agile Manifesto has no role for leadership.
Henny Portman
OCTOBER 18, 2020
In the whitepaper Project Optimism Bias in Capital Investment Decision Making , the author Milvio DiBartolomeo brings us in the world of biases. The whitepaper is divided into four parts.
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No one designs bad dashboards and reports on purpose. So why do so many applications have terrible analytics experiences? Download this ebook for secrets to creating dashboards and reports your users will love.
Henny Portman
OCTOBER 2, 2020
Introduction. This year was my first experience with the IPMA Global Excellence Award. I was already several times assessor and judge for the PMO of the world award. But those assessments are completely different. You watch on your own a one-hour presentation of a PMO.
Henny Portman
OCTOBER 4, 2020
Last week I received a few copies of a brand new magazine from Vincent Snijder, the editor in chief. A magazine for the Blue Striped Frog community of professionals who are engaged in transformations towards increasing organizational agility.
Henny Portman
MARCH 24, 2020
A few weeks ago, I was for a three-day assessment training regarding the IPMA Project Excellence Model in Vilnius, Lithonia. For 3 days, by using action learning we familiarized ourselves with the Project Excellence Model. This model will be used to judge which large and mega-sized projects will receive the project excellence award. The Project Excellence Model (PEM) is described in the book Project Excellence Baseline for Achieving Excellence in Projects and Programmes.
Henny Portman
OCTOBER 7, 2020
After nine years there is a new edition of the Managing Successful Programmes (MSP) guide. It’s a best practice so I assume the changes will be incremental and not a revolution. Good to see that the guide is 80 pages less (now 224 pages) and I really like the four scenario’s which are used to show what specific topics mean for the different scenarios.
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If you are looking to modernize your application to improve competitiveness, then one of the quickest wins you can have is to embed sophisticated analytics that will wow your existing and prospective customers.
Henny Portman
OCTOBER 11, 2020
Happy to see my A new bird’s eye view on the agile forest article in the October edition of the Project Management World Journal (PMWJ). It’s less than a year ago when the first edition of this article won an award. At that moment it contained 50 agile ways of working.
Henny Portman
SEPTEMBER 9, 2020
If you want to make the transformation to a self-managing organization the book Moose heads on the table – Stories about self-managing organisations from Sweden by Karin Tenelius and Lisa Gill is a good starting point.
Henny Portman
AUGUST 1, 2020
The quest to find more trees for my agile forest continues. Structural Agility is again a way of working that fits in the culture targeted box of my The bird’s eye view on the agile forest overview and complements ‘frameworks’ like Scrum, SAFe, Less, disciplined Agile, et cetera.
Henny Portman
SEPTEMBER 7, 2020
Proud to see that the PM World Journal published a next article that I wrote together with Marisa Silva. As you might recall, last year we (Marisa Silva and myself) went on a safari to hunt the project creatures that could negatively impact a portfolio of projects [ Silva, M. and Portman, H. 2019).
Advertisement
Selecting the right solution for your embedded analytics is crucial to the success of your application. But with so many solutions and vendors, how do you make this critical selection? Learn about the different approaches to analytics and the pros and cons for each.
Henny Portman
FEBRUARY 22, 2020
AIPMO is developing the first ‘leading’ international PMO standard based on a combination of research findings and expert knowledge. Developing an international standard is big responsibility because it can create or destroy value depending on the content, how it is written and how the content is interpreted. For example, if an industry is in a mess and you standardize a mess, you keep it in a mess.
Henny Portman
SEPTEMBER 25, 2020
Agile Conversations – Transform Your Conversations, Transform your Culture , written by Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick could be one of the missing pieces to make your agile transition work. The book starts with some background information regarding the ideas and theories that underpin the conversational tools that will be used in the rest of the book. You get an explanation of the core techniques of the authors’ four R’s method.
Henny Portman
MAY 25, 2020
Many organizations are struggling with their business agility transformation. One of the reasons is the way they have organized their teams. The focus was probably on efficiency and if these teams start to use agile ways of working, this doesn’t make the organization agile. The book Team topologies – Organizing business and technology teams for fast flow , by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, will help you to design a team organization structure that helps you to become more agile.
Henny Portman
SEPTEMBER 3, 2020
Quite often you hear the words blockchain, bitcoin or cryptocurrency, but do you really know what is meant with those words? Tiana Laurence wrote the book Introduction to Blockchain Technology – The many faces of blockchain technology in the 21 st century to demystify these words.
Advertisement
How can project planning that stretches over months or years remain relevant and account for new ad-hoc activities that arrive every day?
Henny Portman
APRIL 28, 2020
Rethinking agile – Why agile teams have nothing to do with business agility written by Klaus Leopold is great book to cope with agile transformations and what you have to do to increase the chance of success. It definitely busted the myth that having agile teams makes you agile. The book is divided into four parts: the problem, the causes, the first solution, and the result. The book starts with a case study of an organization that wants to optimize their time-to-market.
Henny Portman
APRIL 21, 2020
DevOps for the modern enterprise – winning practices to transform legacy IT organizations is a practical book based on the experience of the author Mirco Hering. The book is divided into three parts. The first part explains how to create the right ecosystem for success. The second part puts the people and organizational dimension in the spotlights and the last part emphasizes on technology and architecture aspects.
Henny Portman
APRIL 1, 2020
One of the principles of the Agile Manifesto is “ Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential ”. Studies from the Standish Group and recorded in one of their Chaos reports shows that 60% of developed features are not or rarely used. If you only deliver the right features your customer will get the product much faster and cheaper. Looking at the features of the product you are developing is one way to take this principle into account.
Henny Portman
JUNE 6, 2020
The book 97 Things Every Scrum Practitioner Should Know edited by Gunther Verheyen contains the wisdom of 69 practitioners around the world and helps you to improve your understanding of Scrum ( nb. Who are we missing on the cover of the book? ). Gunther organized these 97 essays around ten themes. These themes cover all aspects of Scrum and beyond. The events, the different roles, their behavior, the skills, collaboration and the artifacts. The book ends with a simple Scrum glossary.
Speaker: Chris Von Simson & Nat Venkataraman
Can your users get the data and analytics they need without leaving your application? Watch this webinar with Chris von Simson of Dresner Advisory Services as he shares why user enablement has emerged as the theme in today’s embedded analytics landscape.
Henny Portman
APRIL 9, 2019
If you look at the AgilePM (The DSDM Agile Project Framework) documentation set-up you could ask yourself if it’s not too much for an agile way of working? In AgilePM the following documents are described: Terms of Reference. Business Case. Prioritised Requirements List. Solution Architecture Definition. Development Approach Definition. Delivery Plan. Management Approach Definition. Feasibility Assessment. Foundation Summary. Evolving Solution. Timebox Plan. Timebox Review Record.
Henny Portman
MARCH 17, 2020
During training classes I often notice that students mix these words together. After reading this article I hope you understand the relationship between incremental and iterative development. I will start with a comparison of a waterfall and an agile approach by delivering a payment app. In the second part of this article, I position waterfall and agile in an incremental versus iterative cross or matrix and shows what happens in the other two quadrants too (will be part of a next blog post).
Henny Portman
APRIL 3, 2020
The 10X Growth Machine – How companies can innovate, scale and win , written by Misha de Sterke, is a book to build your own growth machine by using innovation as a means. It offers a very detailed description of a battle-tested methodology with a framework, a canvas, seven models and eleven tools. Creative destruction is accelerating. The average life expectancy for European and Japanese companies is 12.5 years and around 10% of all companies disappear each year.
Henny Portman
MAY 30, 2019
The Agile Fluency model, developed by Diana Larsen and James Shore in 2012 and substantially updated in 2018, is a framework to help teams understand their current position and to help them develop an individual road map. Agile teams pass through four distinct zones of fluency as they learn ( fluency evolves). Diana Larsen defines fluency as things that you do automatically without thinking. Each zone brings specific benefits: Focusing teams produce business value (agile fundamentals).
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This eBook describes the process of managing the project budget and its associated costs.
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