What typically happens when product development decides to create a superior product? Answer, slower delivery and costlier development than previous products. Why?

The people whose opinion counts the most choose to go for faster delivery speed. Their thinking may be sound; in this case, they want to beat their competitors to market.

Choosing faster product delivery visibly sacrifices product quality and, in my experience, it often invisibly sacrifices the economy of product support. In this post, I answer the following questions:

• What is a tradeoff?
• What distinguishes a conscious from an unconscious tradeoff?
• What is the impact of trading off quality for speed?
• What can you do to change the choice?

There are different types of meetings. Each type requires a different structures and supports a different number of participants. For instance, a status (feedforward) meeting has no limit to the number of participants while a decision-making meeting produces results faster with a small number of participants.

If you want to help your teams have more effective meetings, set the participants expectations about the meeting by stating in the agenda --

• the purpose of the meeting.
• the type of meeting

What element of a project retrospective, in your experience, separates the average retrospective from the outstanding? For today, I would answer, "A visual history of the project created by the participants during the retrospective."

What does a visual project history look like? Why is it a key element to an outstanding retrospective?

Several of my friends who work for the same large organization tell me they are bored with their job. I hear about them waiting for management to complete the process of setting a new direction for the organization.

What opportunities are available to employees when management is in the process of setting a new direction?

What does it say abut the participants of a weekly meeting when the meeting consistently starts 5-10 minutes behind schedule?

Answer, the participants are cooperating with each other to start late. 

"We know better than they do about what's needed." Whenever you hear an influential member of your team utter those words, fasten your safety belt. The team is nearing the Twilight Zone.

What vital element of business communication is the most forgotten?

Is your team more like a basketball or a track team?

What's the difference between these types of teams? Why is the difference important?

You transmit and receive meaning through a communication system that uses tools, such as words, sounds, tones, rhythm, touch, movement and so on. Words are a powerful tool within the system. They are used more consciously than any of the other tools.