Process Improvement

For a long time, I thought that if a Scrum team maintained consistent velocity, we had a pretty good indication that the delivery system was working. The team was completing r...

If you’ve been managing highly specialized teams, you’ll certainly have seen how specialization dictates the priority of the work. Worse yet, it often creates road blocks pre...

Every delivery team eventually runs into the same situation. A piece of work is progressing well until it suddenly stops. Maybe you're waiting on another team. Maybe a customer n...

Sooner or later, every delivery leader gets asked to produce a benchmark. The team's cycle time is finally on a chart, someone senior leans in, and out comes the question: how do...

If you coach teams or manage delivery, you already know the moment I mean. Someone senior asks when the work will be done. A date comes with it, pushed across the table with no c...

More and more teams are pointing an LLM at their raw delivery data, straight out of Jira or Azure DevOps, and asking it for their flow metrics. Cycle time, throughput, a for...

Almost every delivery team I work with is pointing AI at the same place: the building. Developers adopt it, the coding genuinely speeds up, and there's real excitement about...

Every delivery team has done it. A high-priority request comes in, so the team drops what they were doing and pushes it through. The urgent item ships, everyone exhales, and...

Entry-level consulting demand drops 40% between 2023 and 2025. In the same period, demand for senior advisory work — the strategic, high-judgment engagements — grows 55%...

Every coach working with leadership teams is getting this question. In quarterly reviews, procurement calls, board presentations, and budget discussions, someone asks whether AI ...

The recommendation landed. Leadership agreed. The meeting ended. Everyone stood up. And then the real work started — in the hallway, at the coffee counter, in the elevator,...

Your CFD shows the gap. More work entering the system than leaving it. The cumulative flow lines are spreading apart and you can see the problem building in real time. Bu...

You've done the analysis. The flow data tells a clear story — one initiative is choking the system. Cycle time is climbing, aging work is piling up, and three teams are bl...

The engagement starts Monday. The coach hasn't met anyone yet. And the investigation is already done. Every bottleneck traced. Every aging item flagged. Every capacity gap qua...

I watched a coach do something last year that I'll never forget. She was four weeks into an engagement. The data was clear. Three teams sharing a single deployment pipeline, cycl...

I was on a call with a coach last month. She'd just wrapped a six-month engagement with a mid-size fintech company. Solid work. The leadership team was satisfied. Teams had better...

I once spent two weeks building a recommendation for a leadership team. Throughput data, cycle time analysis, bottleneck mapping, aging work items. The whole picture. I walked in ...

I watched two coaches present to the same company last quarter. Different divisions, same tool, same AI-generated investigation. The findings were nearly identical: a testing st...