When the Chips Ran Out: One Buyer's Playbook for the Semiconductor Crunch
A 12-week chip lead time became 52. Here is how one procurement team stopped firefighting and built a strategy for the 2022 semiconductor shortage.
Read more →Insights
XNM Blog
Practical guidance on capital projects, governance, financing, and delivery for Indigenous and public-sector leaders.
Articles
Counting the Wrong Things: A Sampling Story From a Strained Supply Year
A municipal works crew thought their parts failures were spiking. The real problem was how they sampled. A practical look at statistical sampling basics.
Read more →When the Team Goes Remote: What One Distributed Scrum Team Learned the Hard Way
A distributed Scrum team kept missing its Sprint Goal even though everyone was busy. Here is what changed when they stopped copying the in-room rituals and rebuilt the basics for remote.
Read more →The Status Meeting That Cost a Project Six Weeks
A capital project lost weeks to meetings nobody needed. Here is what went wrong, and the simple habits that gave the team its calendar back.
Read more →Buying Well When Prices Won't Sit Still: Procurement Under Inflation
Inflation rewrites the rules of buying. A beginner's guide to protecting budgets and supply when prices keep climbing.
Read more →Where Work Gets Stuck: A Plain Guide to Finding the Bottleneck
The Theory of Constraints says one step limits the whole. Here is how to find that step and stop wasting effort everywhere else.
Read more →Running Scrum When the Budget Is Fixed
Agile and a fixed budget are not enemies. A beginner's guide to delivering with Scrum when the money is capped but the scope can flex.
Read more →Picking Project KPIs That Actually Tell You Something
A plain-language guide to choosing a handful of project KPIs that drive decisions, not a dashboard full of numbers nobody acts on.
Read more →When the Boxes Won't Move: Surviving a Container and Freight Crunch
A freight crunch punishes shippers who react late and rewards those who planned for it. Here is what separates a resilient supply chain from a fragile one.
Read more →Reading the Floor at a Glance: Visual Management Done Right and Done Wrong
Good visual management lets anyone walking through a workspace see status, problems and standards in seconds. Here is how to tell the real thing from theatre.
Read more →The Hardening Sprint Is a Confession, Not a Cure
A sprint set aside to 'stabilize' before release is a sign the work was never really done. Here is what a healthy increment looks like versus the hardening-sprint anti-pattern.
Read more →Leading a Distributed Project: What Good Looks Like, and What Sinks One
Remote project leadership lives or dies on clarity, not surveillance. A side-by-side look at the habits that hold distributed teams together — and the ones that quietly erode them.
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