Tag Archives: Values

Culture Matters: Understanding My Colleagues (and me) Better

Culture is a collective programming of the human mind

One thing I love with my job is working with people from many different countries. This not only makes you learn about other cultures, you also learn a lot about your own.

But working together across cultures is also sometimes a challenge. To learn more  I participated in an intercultural management training last week. This is my summary and thoughts. I have focused on data and examples for countries I often work with. My class consisted of colleagues from our offices in Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, France and Sweden. Continue reading →

Applied Kanban Values: Transforming the PMO, Part 3

In part one I touched briefly on plans and forecasts. In this post about customer focus and flow for the PMO i come back to them.

Flow: don’t work in the system, work on the system

In our PMO we had plans covering about three to 15 months: there were high-level milestone plans, mid-level milestone plans and low-level detailed milestone plans.

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Applied Kanban Values: Transforming the PMO, part 2

Respect: put away the RACI

Have you ever produced a RACI document? Together with many other steering documents it forms a pillar for the PMO, and defines who is responsible, accountable, contributing or only informed for each and every step in a process. In a RACI meeting you would typically discuss whether the product owner should contribute in the UX work for his/her story or only be informed. Or maybe the PO is actually accountable even though the UX expert is obviously responsible?

Kanban should be like water, making its way through cracks.

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