Insights
Practical guidance on capital projects, governance, financing, and delivery for Indigenous and public-sector leaders.
Machine learning projects have characteristics that challenge standard Scrum: outcomes are probabilistic not deterministic, experiments replace features as the unit of work, training data is a dependency, and model performance is a curve rather than a binary pass or fail. Adapting Scrum for ML does not require abandoning the framework — it requires extending it with ML-specific practices.
Read more →A pre-mortem is a structured exercise where the project team imagines the project has already failed and works backwards to identify what caused it. Unlike conventional risk workshops, the pre-mortem makes it psychologically safe to surface disagreements about the plan that might never emerge in a positive planning conversation.
Read more →Not all supply chain decisions should be optimised for cost. For critical inputs — national security materials, essential medicines, semiconductor components, food staples — strategic considerations override cost efficiency. Organisations that have not made this distinction explicitly are making it implicitly, and not always wisely.
Read more →Lean transformation fails without leadership behaviour change. The practices that make a conventional leader effective — managing by reports, directing teams through solutions, rewarding heroic problem-solvers — are precisely the behaviours that prevent Lean from taking root. Lean leaders operate differently, and the difference is visible in what they do every day.
Read more →Site Reliability Engineering originated at Google as a way to apply software engineering practices to the problem of running systems at scale. Integrating SRE concepts with Scrum — SLOs as product commitments the Product Owner owns, error budgets as a mechanism for balancing feature work against reliability, toil budgets, and blameless postmortems feeding the product backlog — produces teams that ship features and keep systems healthy at the same time.
Read more →Most project managers operate in shared-resource environments where team members split their time across multiple projects simultaneously. The result is resource contention, context-switching costs, and unresolved priority conflicts that erode delivery performance across every project in the portfolio. There are practical approaches that significantly reduce this friction without requiring a dedicated team for every project.
Read more →Freight invoice errors are more common than most shippers realise — industry estimates put overpayment rates at two to five percent of total freight spend. A disciplined freight audit and payment programme identifies those errors systematically, recovers overpayments, and provides the data needed to manage carrier contracts effectively.
Read more →Statistical Process Control uses statistical methods to monitor a process and distinguish between the normal variation that is always present and the unusual signals that require action. Control charts are the primary tool — and understanding how to read and act on them is a skill that improves process outcomes without requiring a statistician on staff.
Read more →Security is often treated as a gate at the end of the development process — a penetration test before release, a compliance checkbox before go-live. Shifting left means integrating security earlier: into the Definition of Done, into user stories, and into every Sprint as a first-class quality criterion, not an afterthought.
Read more →Project managers are accountable for outcomes they rarely have the authority to command. The work gets done through people who report to someone else, have competing priorities, and can reasonably say no. Understanding how influence actually works — and what to do when it fails — is the core practical skill of the project management profession.
Read more →Supply chain finance is a set of financial instruments that optimise cash flow between buyers and suppliers — without changing the underlying commercial terms. When deployed well, SCF allows buyers to extend days payable outstanding while actually improving supplier cash flow. Understanding when it helps, when it obscures, and when it creates systemic risk is essential for any procurement or treasury professional.
Read more →Retail is a high-volume, thin-margin environment where small process improvements compound rapidly. Lean Six Sigma offers retailers a disciplined path to reducing waste and variation in the processes that matter most to customers — from inventory accuracy to checkout speed to the experience of returning a purchase.
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