By: Kathy Kent Toney, CEO & Founder of Kent Business Solutions Don't you love those conversations with friends that help create connections between nebulous thoughts that swirl around in your brain and succinctly summarize their meaning? Well, I had one of those conversations a while back. This friend of mine said one thing that has stuck with me. She put words to my life's mission into one sentence: Kathy, you're all about helping people become the best versions of themselves. Wow, she hit the nail on the head. I really couldn't say it better myself! As a certified life coach, I love to help people step into all the good life has in store. I'm also involved in prison ministry. As a worship leader, I can lead the inmate band at our monthly worship services. The men we work with appreciate what we do for them. Knowing I make a difference in people's lives makes my heart sing! So, why am I sharing this with you? Well, it translates well into my passion for work. I'm all about helping businesses become the best that they can be! The primary way I do that is through business transformation. Streamlining operations or undertaking projects to improve your business can result in a healthier bottom line. And that leads to the tagline for my business: I help organizations become profitable beyond their imagination! I do this through the following approaches:
The one service offering I'm most excited about is project management. I use my project management skills to run all kinds of initiatives: process improvement, IT, product development, and customer experience, to name a few. And I've experienced some great results! Scrum Project:
Voice of the Customer:
Sales Process:
For all these reasons listed above, I'm passionate about what I do—helping businesses become the best that they can be! So, that's enough about me. I'd love to find out more about what you do! Are you facing any challenges in your business? I'd love to hop on a Zoom or phone call to brainstorm some solutions with you—for free! If that sounds good, click the button below to schedule a time for us to talk.
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By: Kathy Kent Toney, CEO & Founder of Kent Business Solutions As a business leader, have you and your team embarked on a carefully constructed business plan only to find it quickly unraveled as you executed it? To avoid this trap, here are five suggestions on how to ensure your plans lead to successful outcomes: 1. Bring Your Best to the Table When you develop a plan, include a broad range of opinions, expertise, and experience. In other words, your team's input is essential to plan success. Ensure that your team is included upfront in the planning process so that your plan will result in a well-rounded approach. 2. Develop Contingency Scenarios Even the best plans can go awry when unaccounted-for situations arise. That's why it's important to brainstorm multiple possibilities upfront to ensure your bases are covered if things don't go as you would have liked. A good formula to follow is IF THIS, DO THAT. When such an event occurs, consult with the team to decide which contingency plan would work best (when there are multiple options) and, if need be, adapt your choice to your circumstances. 3. Communicate Plan Changes When you experience changes to your plan, ensure that all your team members and affected stakeholders receive notice of such changes. Doing so will help prevent misunderstandings and potentially wasted effort spent on a previous version of the plan. 4. Create Avenues for Gathering Feedback and Data Make it easy for team members and stakeholders to give you feedback during plan execution so that you can make adjustments along the way. This will help ensure your path to success. Providing a forum for regular reviews where feedback is encouraged is a great way to do this. Monitoring progress through data collection as you execute the plan is also essential. Ensure that your data collection techniques are rigorous enough to ensure data integrity. 5. Plan for Regular Progress Reviews Having everyone on the same page is crucial for plan success. Ensure your team meets on at a pre-determined frequency, considering plan speed, complexity, scope, team availability, and size. The planned frequency and required attendance for particular team members for reviews can change later if the need to do so arises. Here's some good news: a great way to accomplish all these suggestions is through Scrum, a proven, best-practice approach. It just so happens that it's one of my passions! What is Scrum? In short, it's a streamlined way to manage projects. It allows for regular reviews with stakeholders and synergistic daily meetings (called Daily Scrums) that keep communication lines open amongst all team members. Plan changes can be made on the fly and quickly communicated to team members and stakeholders. Better yet, projects can often finish much faster than traditional approaches. You don't need to take my word for it! Click on the button below to download a case study about one of my clients.
By: Kathy Kent Toney, CEO & Founder of Kent Business Solutions Most business leaders over the years have experienced the failure of at least one project. In those instances, many executives have looked at what techniques would help to ensure success for future projects. One different way to view these failures is to hone in on what didn’t work in those situations. Flipping the switch on these scenarios can provide valuable insight into what could’ve worked. Along those lines, what are some common mistakes that project managers can avoid to help ensure success? 1. Failing to Think Outside the Box to Avoid Potential Problems Unfortunately, many Project Management (PMs) are so focused on putting out fires instead of thinking outside the box to help prevent the occurrence of possible challenges. Great PMs are tuned into what could potentially go wrong. They are forward-looking, ask questions, and are on the lookout for problems before they ever occur. 2. Prioritizing the Unimportant over the Important Too often, PMs will focus on minutia instead of the most important things: ensuring the client is happy, tracking to budget, and keeping the project on time, to name a few. For instance, it doesn’t matter nearly as much if someone hasn’t updated a chart or properly marked a task as 40% instead of 50% complete. A good PM constantly weighs what’s most important and tackles those items first. 3. Under-utilizing the Best Aspects of the Team When PMs don’t take the time to understand their individual team members’ strengths and weaknesses, this can sabotage the team functioning at more optimum levels. For example, Bob may excel at performing a particular task, but instead, the PM assigns the task to Suzy who isn’t as skilled at that particular job. Also, some team members may require more oversight than others. Finding out these abilities and assigning team members to perform tasks that match those skills can tremendously boost team productivity. 4. Neglecting to Regularly Test Early-On Assumptions At the beginning of projects, PMs often have to make assumptions based on a scarcity of available information. When more data becomes available, it’s important to test and revise assumptions against this information. Failure to do so can result in serious errors that can affect project success. These are a few examples of steps PMs can take to avoid issues that can lead to project failure. Speaking of avoiding failure, Scrum is a wonderful project management approach that helps identify problems before they ever become issues. As a certified Professional Scrum Master, I’ve experienced this reality repeatedly in my line of work. I’ve also seen how the use of Scrum typically decreases the amount of time to finish projects, and it doesn’t matter what type of project it is. If you have any projects that you would like to undertake but have limited internal resources to complete them, or you are stuck in the middle of a project with little hope of moving forward, I’d love to have a conversation with you! In the meantime, check out one of my case studies of how the use of Scrum helped a local manufacturer successfully launch a new product in record time.
By: Kathy Kent Toney, CEO & Founder of Kent Business Solutions I've been talking to a prospective client over the last couple days about the benefits of Scrum and how it would be a great tool to use for their CRM implementation. Not sure what Scrum is? In short, it's a project management framework is used for developing products. Anyway, it got me to thinking--it's been awhile since I've talked about the value of Scrum. So, I thought I would share with you an experience I had with a client to illustrate how this Agile tool revolutionized this manufacturer's business. Prior to my engagement with my client, they had a very cumbersome, rigid product development process. This became evident when it took them two-to-three years to develop their last new product. Considering the complexity of the product involved, it took them waaay too long! They were like a truck stuck in the mud! The CEO knew there was a better way. That’s why he hired me! And because I'm a certified Professional Scrum Master, this project was right up my alley. The first thing I did was to carry over lessons learned from their previous development effort into the new process. I did this to prevent those issues from happening again. Next, I trained them on Scrum and we developed the new process together. In just two months, the process development piece was complete and I left the project in their very capable hands. And the results were great! Eight months later, they launched not only their originally planned product, but five other component systems that fit across their whole product line. If you take the additional products they developed into account, they experienced a product speed-to-market increase of over 100%! They are so thrilled with Scrum, they are implementing it company-wide, including non-product related functions, like Marketing. And the results have been great so far! So, if you want to prevent your project from getting stuck in in the mud and want to kick it into high gear, Scrum could be your answer. And if you're interested in learning more about Scrum or how to transform you business, I'd love to have a chat! Just click the button below to schedule a time
By: Gordon Tredgold, CEO & Managing Consultant, Leadership Principles LLC Gordon Tredgold is our guest blogger this week. He is a Global Gurus Top 10 Leadership Expert and Speaker. To learn more about Gordon, click this link to visit his website. There is no such thing as failure, only feedback, and it's what we do with that feedback that determines how successful we will ultimately be. When we fail, we have three options:
Early in my career, I had many failures, the worst being a $50k project I was involved in that we delivered for just over $5m. To say that the customer was unhappy would be an understatement. I was mortified, and I became very passionate about avoiding failures. I start looking at them more closely to see if there were any patterns as to what was causing us to fail, which we could then look to mitigate and hopefully use to prevent future failure. The more I investigated, the more obvious it became that all of our failures occurred for the same four reasons. These were: we had the wrong focus, a lack of accountability, we'd made things overly complex, or we lacked transparency into what was needed and into our actual performance. Interestingly as I started to study other failures, I found that these same root causes were also present. Using this feedback, I began to work on improving performance in all four of these areas. Sharpening the Focus: to make sure we had clarity over our goals and what success looked like. When we have the wrong focus, it doesn't matter how hard or how long we will work; we will become frustrated and demotivated by our lack of progress. Boosting Accountability: by clarifying roles, responsibilities, and expectations of that role. This helped to get people to take ownership and better understand what was needed from them. Promoting Simplicity: looking to ensure we didn't follow our natural tendency to over-complicate things, keeping communication clear and straightforward to improve understanding. Without understanding, it leads to confusion and misunderstanding, which will then cause us to fail. Lastly, increasing Transparency: making sure that by doing enough due diligence to ensure we knew what was fully involved in being successful, and having the proper tracking in place to monitor progress. Projects are like icebergs; it's easy to see the third about the water, but the thirds below sink the ship. And suppose we lack transparency in our performance. In that case, we can fall into the happy under-achiever trap, where we think we are doing well and but in reality, we are falling short. By the time we realize this, it's too late; we become destined to be unhappy underachievers. By taking this approach of improving Focus, Accountability, Simplicity, and Transparency, we have not only helped avoid failures; we have helped achieve significantly better results. Focus and Accountability help improve effectiveness by ensuring we have the right people doing the right job, and Simplicity and Transparency help increase efficiency by making things easier and providing feedback on performance so we can see the impact of any changes we make. If you can improve both effectiveness and efficiency, you put yourself well and truly on the path to success. Using this approach has helped me turn around failing projects, underperforming departments and deliver significant business benefits, such as $50m per annum in cost savings and operational performance improvements, increasing on-time delivery from 35 percent to 95 percent. But none of this would have been possible if I hadn't had that big multi-million dollar failure that fired up my passion not to fail again. There is no such thing as failure, only feedback, so how will you use this feedback to benefit you and your company? #### Interested in more content like this? Then sign up for my weekly newsletter! It’s full of leadership tips, including the latest news on digital transformation. Just click the button below to get started!
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