Careers

Using Chaos to Organize large scale programs and projects

I frequently see and hear about how organizations struggle with the planning of programmes or large scale projects, as is often the case nowadays, they involve the integration of many partners, business units, mavericks, doubters and in summary complexity. The complexity, at first, creates chaos which manifests itself as overwhelming dependencies and uncertain delivery dates. […]

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Is Governance a pain in the ass?

All Featured Articles, Careers / Simon

‘Governance’ is a term that is becoming more and more popular in today’s business. Governance, in essence, is the process of policing an organization internally, making sure standards and policies are adhered to, budgets are kept and that decisions are rational and appropriately transparent. Governance is there to ensure your organization complies with Sarbanes-Oxley, should

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Governance

The ‘art’ of Opening and Closing meetings

Careers / Simon

If as you’ve felt that your meetings haven’t had the right spark of energy, or actually resulted in anything but a room full of hot air, then read on.

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Communicating Bad News Effectively: A Guide to Delivering Difficult Messages

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Nobody enjoys delivering bad news, but at some point, we all have to. How you communicate bad news significantly impacts the outcome.

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Principle vs Specific arguments

All Featured Articles, Careers / Simon

I’m constantly reminded how a dynamic of argument and debate is in the wrong place. A recent issue cropped up where a colleague was pushing back to a technical supplier because insufficient information had been provided against a change request. The problem though was that the phrasing of the pushback was principle-based, i.e. he argued

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The impact of Unplanned Work

Careers / Simon

This might resonate with you if you’re a technical professional: how many times have you been asked to do a piece of work (often portrayed as a ‘small’ job) which disrupts planned activities and means one of both slip or are done with compromise? A study in 2002 found that IT departments can be spending

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