Kaveh Kalantar's Blog

In " 4 Behaviors That Can Save or Destroy a Project " blog post, I described four behavior which they can impact a project delivery time, quality and cost. These behaviors are: Student Syndrome, No Early Work Transfers, Parkinson's Law, Polychronicity. However, project management frameworks such as Scrum provides simple and effective tools and techniques to deal with these type of behaviors. Such tools and techniques are: Time-boxing, Volunteerism, Continues Self-Inspection, Transparency, Continues ordering (prioritization) and Team Estimation. Everything in Scrum framework is time-boxed. Every meeting is time-boxed, every sprint or iteration is time-boxed. There is no deadline, but there are many time-boxes! Teams using time-boxing are way more productive than teams using deadlines. There is a shift in mindset from "We need to work hard to meet our deadline" to "How much we can get done in the given time". This is very basic but very powerful change

Alfred Sloan is the one who actually made General Motors a strong brand and a market dominant for decades. One of the strategies he implemented was a simple multi-brand strategy. He reduced the number of GM cars to five and categories them by price. As Jack Trout stated at Big Brands Big Troubles, "The policy was to mass-produce a full line of different cars that were graded upwards in quality and price. The concept was to get people into GM family and move them up. It was one of the earliest examples of market segmentation" Chevrolet $450 - $600 Pontiac    $600 - $900 Buick      $900 - $1,700 Oldsmobile $1,700 - $ 2,700 Cadilac      $2,700 - $3,500 More than a half century past from those glorious days of GM, and companies who do not learn from history continue to have irrational product lines and they all ask why do we loose market share. They look into their marketing budget, sales force, technology and many areas but not the root cause of their failure. However, t

I have described in Co-opetitive Virtual Teams - An Introduction  the current trend of many companies, who try to cooperate and compete globally to retain their current clients and win more businesses. At this blog, I will open the discussion of the role of the project manager who has a Co-opetitive Virtual Team. (Let's call her Mrs.PM) Mrs. PM has different challenges than her colleague who work in a non-copetitive virtual team: She needs to balance client stakeholders and a team of competitors! She has to balance the sales team passion of winning more businesses to be able to keep the overall Co-opetitive strategy healthy, But she does not have enough position or coercive power over account/sales team. She has to be able to manage a pool of resources, but these resources are from competing companies , so she need to balance the usage of resources and try to minimize conflict between competing teams! She has to keep all team members - from all groups - motivated and she mus