10 Ways to Motivate Employees During Lean Times

This Management Note presents research and arguments to support the following 10 suggestions for keeping employees motivated during lean times.

1. Leadership must exude credible confidence.
2. Acknowledge challenges with respect and self-assurance.
3. Train or replace weak or ineffective leaders.
4. Replace or reposition employees who are weak or ineffective at their job.
5. Don't throw money at fear.
6. Abstain from Title Inflation.
7. Keep people busy with meaningful work.
8. Solicit input from employees.
9. Don't count pencils to save money.
10. Recognize and affirm progress.

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Junk Bonds Versus IT Projects

Traditional financial investments are almost always compared to a benchmark and usually adjusted for risk. Most projects are evaluated solely on the basis of ROI, which is blind to risk.

This presentation demonstrates how to compute the Risk Adjusted Performance (RAP) for projects using B rated junk bonds as the benchmark. Because junk bonds fail far less frequently than projects, they often are the more prudent investment.

The value of RAP analysis is more in the exercise than the numeric results. Our hope is RAP will encourage managers and practitioners to be more proactive about quantifying unpredictability and managing it explicitly. Unpredictability will not go away, but we can certainly make it cost much less.

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Learning From Space Shuttle Disasters To Prevent IT Project Disasters

Projects often die a death of 10,000 bad decisions. The result; junk bonds continue to sport a better risk adjusted return on investment (see Junk Bonds Versus IT Projects). Findings from Behavioral Economics and Decision Science are used to analyze the loss of the space shuttles and show how the contribution of poor decision making in these tragedies is often the same as for project failures. The results suggest that until decision pathologies are addressed directly, poor project performance will persist.

The first version of this talk was presented at Agile 2013 in Nashville, TN. Consequently some practitioner-specific jargon is used; however, the amount is so small that virtually all readers should have no difficulty understanding the main points.

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Junk Bonds v. IT Projects (No Math)

This "no-math" version of Junk Bonds Versus IT Projects avoids mathematics to the greatest extent possible.

Note that the embedded movie showing how phantom traffic jams can appear out of nowhere cannot be included in a pdf file. The Java simulation program used to create the movie can be run in a new window from here. It's been hard-wired to initialize with just enough traffic for a "Jamiton" to occur within 30 seconds.

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Project Portfolio Tools
An Album of Annotated Figures

This document is a "photo album" of the key figures that summarize "Measure and Match" and the "I-C Map". The purpose of this document is to provide a condensed summary of the original presentation, "Measure and Match: Mitigating 'Mismatch' Risk". The full presentation is available in the resources section of this website.

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Project Portfolio Tools
Measure and Match Presentation

Presented at the April 23, 2014 Beyond Agile meetup in Seattle, this presentation covers Measure and Match and the I-C Map. These are two tools developed to help with project portfolio management. Please also have a look at the annotated figures in "Project Portfolio Tools, An Album of Annotated Figures" which is available from the menu on the left.

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Product Title

Very brief description.

Objective

Things to be achieved.

Approach

Very high level flow.

Outcome

The result/benefit of achieving our objectives.