andrea hammer

How hard is it to innovate? Not once but over and over? How can you repeatedly implement great new products, processes or services? Continuous innovation is not easy and if you keep using the same method you will experience diminishing results. Try innovating how you innovate by employing some of these ideas. - andrea hammer

Calibrate Definition: make fine adjustments for optimal measuring The expression “A map is not the territory” first appeared in print in a paper that Alfred Korzybski delivered in 1931, meaning that a map can describe a territory in a similar structure that allows us to take a route through the land, providing a useful tool, but that our perception of the map can never equal the territory, but only our version of it, our map. This started me thinking about how we design training programmes based upon guidelines, criteria, a syllabus (A map), only to find of course, that it looks slightly different from delegates real world experience their territory. Hence the need to calibrate making those fine adjustments to our maps to accommodate the reality of the territory. The context in which learning takes place and the context in which the learning is applied are very different terrains. - andrea hammer

am heading back East to deliver my PPM presentation in Philadelphia and then in Boston. I am doing a special version in Boston, as a precursor to 3 PPM User Presentations. The point of my talk will be to underscore the strategic and critical nature of the discipline. I hope to establish some enthusiasm for the Practitioners who will be sharing their PPM challenges and experiences with the audience. As I modified my PPM presentation I found myself reflecting on my very first slide. The slide is titled, "Sound Familiar?" It is a list of first-person statements I use to kick off my PPM and PMO presentations. The idea behind the slide is to establish a sense of fraternity and connection with the audience by listing complaints to which they can relate. It also sets the stage for my following slide describing the problems to be solved with good PPM processes and PMO practices. - andrea hammer

I’ve spoken with a number of CEO’s that didn’t know what or when their teams were going to deliver. I’ll give you one guess to what that did to the dynamics in that organization. And it isn’t necessarily anyone’s fault. Well okay, it’s everyone’s fault actually. It typically comes down to a few things: Expectations from business are either miscommunicated or not known by the team; rest assured, they are still there. The systems in place (project management, time tracking, etc.) do not produce the information that business needs to make informed decisions. The systems in place take so much work to keep up that the Team don’t use them as they take loads of time away from them producing value, thus creating the above issue. There is a trust deficit due to weeks, months, or years of non-delivery on the part of the Team. There are many reasons this can happen, including lack of clear project vision, no one prioritizing the work, the plan of action is mercurial at best. - andrea hammer