Platform Engineering and Scrum: Building the Developer Experience
March 19, 2023 · 4 min read
Platform engineering is one of the fastest-growing disciplines in modern software organisations. By building internal developer platforms that product teams use to self-serve infrastructure, deployment, and tooling, platform teams reduce cognitive load, accelerate time-to-production, and improve reliability at scale. Understanding how Scrum works for a platform team — rather than a product team — unlocks the full potential of the model.
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Organisational Change Management and Projects: Building the Bridge
March 18, 2023 · 4 min read
The most common failure mode in transformation projects is not technical — it is human. A system that no one uses effectively, a process that no one follows, an organisation that reverts to old habits within months of go-live: these are change management failures, not delivery failures. Integrating OCM into the project life cycle is the difference between projects that deliver outputs and projects that deliver outcomes.
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Category Management: Moving Beyond Tactical Buying
March 17, 2023 · 3 min read
Category management treats procurement spend as a portfolio, grouping related purchases into categories and managing each strategically. For organisations that have been buying commodity-by-commodity, the shift unlocks significant and sustained savings — along with supply chain resilience that transactional buying can never deliver.
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Lean Six Sigma and Environmental Sustainability: The 9th Waste
March 16, 2023 · 4 min read
The original seven wastes of Lean were conceived on the factory floor, but a growing body of practice has extended the list — first to eight, and now to nine. The ninth waste is environmental waste, and it may be the most consequential of all.
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Scrum Anti-Patterns: The Signs Your Process Is Broken
March 15, 2023 · 4 min read
Scrum anti-patterns are practices that look like Scrum but undermine the outcomes Scrum is designed to produce. They are insidious because they are usually adopted with good intentions — as workarounds for real constraints — and because they can persist for months before their cost becomes visible.
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The Project Closure: Why Endings Matter
March 14, 2023 · 4 min read
Project closure is the phase most frequently abbreviated, rushed, or skipped entirely. The team is tired, the sponsor has moved on, and resources have already been reassigned. What is lost is real: lessons learned, knowledge transfer, formal acceptance, contract closure, and the motivation of the team that will deliver the next project.
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Procurement Analytics: Turning Spend Data into Strategic Insight
March 13, 2023 · 4 min read
Most organisations have more procurement data than they know what to do with — spread across ERP systems, purchasing cards, contract repositories, and supplier invoices. Spend analytics is the discipline of consolidating, cleansing, classifying, and enriching that data to turn it into decisions: which categories to address, which suppliers to challenge, and where the organisation is leaving value on the table.
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The Voice of the Customer: How to Translate Needs into Requirements
March 12, 2023 · 4 min read
VOC — the Voice of the Customer — is the cornerstone of the DMAIC Define phase. Understanding what customers actually need, as distinct from what they say they need and what they have not yet thought to ask for, is the difference between improving the wrong thing and solving the right problem.
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Observability in Agile: Making Your Systems Understandable
March 11, 2023 · 4 min read
Observability — the ability to understand what is happening inside a system from its external outputs — belongs in the Definition of Done. If you cannot observe it, you cannot support or improve it.
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Project Communication: What to Report, to Whom, and When
March 10, 2023 · 4 min read
Project communication planning is often done poorly — too much, too little, wrong format for the audience, no feedback loop. A stakeholder communication matrix and a clear distinction between status and forecast reporting can change that.
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Humanitarian Supply Chains: Logistics in Crisis Situations
March 9, 2023 · 4 min read
Humanitarian supply chains operate under conditions that would shut down most commercial supply chains entirely. What organisations like the WFP, ICRC, and UNICEF have built — and what commercial supply chains can learn from them.
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Women in Lean Six Sigma: Driving Change from Every Level
March 8, 2023 · 4 min read
On International Women's Day, we examine how women have been disproportionately effective continuous-improvement leaders — and what organisations can do to support more of them in Lean Six Sigma roles.
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