I am a big advocate of storytelling as a way of getting your message across and whilst this is a method usually associated with speeches and presentations I believe it …
Organizational Debt — A Necessary Evil
Regardless of their state of growth, all companies face a certain level of organizational debt, which can paralyze them if it’s not kept under control. Alina Ghiarasim, Lead Business Analyst, EndavaAlina …
Presenting Over The Web
It is a feature of our new reality that we are increasingly communicating through disembodied means (I’m talking web rather than Ouija board here) and this can cause problems for …
How Your Business Can Quickly Adopt a Customer First Strategy
Every few days there seems to be another customer service disaster that fills the newspapers and goes viral on social media. These usually happen when an organisation does not adopt …
3 Simple Creative Habits That Will Change Your Career
If you work in a company, that you aren’t part of the “creative team” or don’t have a position that is suited to creativity, this is definitely for you! Most …
Unaccustomed As I Am To Public Speaking Part 5
This article in my series on Presentation Skills I am going to look at something that all presenters have to face and overcome… I’m talking about nerves, stress, the heebie-jeebies, …
Winning with Culture: Using Culture To Play Offense
We’ve found that culture is often taken for granted in the day-to-day operations of an organization, particularly when times are good. Leaders tend to focus on the factors most directly …
Transforming Ideas Into Outcomes At Market-Speed – A Series of Four Articles on Investing in Change
How Ideas Turn into Outcomes The Outcomes Your Enterprise Creates Come From a Mash-Up of Many Ideas Let’s begin with how everything ends, and talk about outcomes. People create outcomes …
Every Transformation Needs A NED
In my experience life as a Non-Executive Director is a difficult balancing act. Staying close enough to the business to understand where it is and how it is working – …
The Danger Of Jumping To A “Solution” And The Importance Of Pre-Project Problem Analysis
We’ve probably all worked in situations where the word ‘problem’ is seen as a dirty word. This is understandable to some extent—after all, discussing a problem situation seems a lot …
The Power of Questions – Using Clean Language© and Metaphor to Explore the “How to” of Change Management
In change management we are often excellent at describing what we can usefully be doing as practitioners – employing frameworks, methodologies and models to ensure our interventions are focussed and …
Business Change & Transformation Conference Europe 16-18 March 2020, London
There are six weeks until our Business Change and Transformation Conference Europe 2020 taking place in London from 16-18 March. You can view some of the subjects that will be …
Unaccustomed As I Am To Public Speaking Part 4
In my last post I discussed crafting the structure of a presentation. In this post I’m going to take you through some of my thoughts regarding how your deck should …
Ghosts Of Tom’s Past, Present And Future
The world is evolving, business is evolving, consulting is evolving. This will never stop. So those organisations that don’t constantly adapt will wither and die. Target Operating Model (TOM) design …
Have You Ever Jumped from an Airplane? Journey of Delivering a Complex Project/Program in Public Sector
Imagine – you’re on an airplane flying at 13,000 feet. From this perspective, the world below looks far away; objects on the ground are small and out of focus, clouds …
The World Doesn’t Need Another Roaring Twenties!
I was slow on the uptake, and it took me a while to realise why several people seemed to be going to parties dressed either as flappers or Al Capone …
Mind The Gap – Incorporating the Change Agenda Into Scaled Agile Approaches
We are looking forward to sharing our experiences and insights into the nuances around holistic change and how to incorporate it with scaled agile approaches. Too many agile approaches focus …
Measuring Business Process Performance
This was the question asked of me recently: “If you separately set KPIs for each of the processes in a process architecture, how do you know that they are properly …
Exploring The Bond Between Business Analysis & UX At The Business Analysis Conference Europe 2019
I recently presented a workshop at the Business Analysis Conference Europe 2019 by the industry group International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA) where an illustrator created this image summarizing the …
Business Analysis Viewpoints
There are an infinite number of ways of looking at any system. This article examines useful viewpoints that help Business Analysts to understand the real problem and come up with …