Most rework is born the moment someone calls a thing finished when it was only nearly finished. A written Definition of Done is the cheap fix nobody bothers to write.
The Blog
52 articles · page 2 of 5
Starting more work feels productive and finishes nothing. Cap the number of things in progress and the same effort starts closing things faster.
Every planning tool is a theory about what makes work go wrong. From Gantt's bars to today's boards, each era fixed the last era's blind spot and quietly created a new one.
A practical framework for the delegate-or-do-it decision, weighing your skill edge, the time you have, the stakes, and who grows from the work.
A goal is a feeling until you can see whether you are ahead or behind. A burndown chart turns that feeling into a line you cannot argue with.
Give a task a week and it eats a week. Give it an afternoon and somehow it still gets done. The deadline was never measuring the work; it was creating it.
Toyota learned to see the waste hiding inside busy work. The same seven wastes and the same pull-based flow translate cleanly from the factory floor to a knowledge worker's day.
A roadmap drawn in fog is a forecast pretending to be a contract. Trade the rigid timeline for rolling-wave planning and a now/next/later board.
One vague assumption about a test environment cost five teams two weeks. The fix for projects that derail isn't more words, it's more precise ones.
Two managers, same chaotic Monday: one is firefighting a supplier slip, the other already wrote the contingency weeks ago. The gap is one quiet hour.
Gantt charts to repaint a hallway are absurd, but the renovation that drifts three months late is real. Here is a framework light enough to fix that.
When a project fits on a napkin, PRINCE2 is the doorstop you do not need. Micro.P3.express is the pocket knife: structure for one to seven people, no ceremony.