Innoliteracy: From Design Thinking to Tangible Change encourages you to allocate resources in the earliest phases of your next development or change project—to the fuzzy front end, where the problem is unveiled and understood, scoped, defined, and challenged, and where the roadmap for how to introduce something new or replace something existing with something better is drawn. The book is based on a series of reflections, experiences, observations, and anecdotes as well as a guide to a better development process, referring to examples, case studies, and existing literature and research. Innoliteracy is for anyone who is engaged in—or even just curious about—change and development processes, especially how they are made more stakeholder-focused, thoroughly framed and reframed, and how one makes sure that the most relevant and imminent problem is addressed.

Only 39 percent of projects today are successful. Nearly half of the projects that fail do so because of “poor requirements management” (PMI 2014). Leveraging Business Analysis for Project Success, Second Edition explores the role of the business analyst in setting a project up for success. It informs and educates project managers, sponsors, and organization leaders on what is necessary for project success. This book goes beyond requirements management in exploring how business analysis professionals (business analysts, product managers, product owners, and others) can contribute to increased profitability through project selection, scope definition, and postimplementation evaluation. The reader will learn about the history of business analysis, professional organizations and resources to support the profession, and what to expect from the business analysis professional at each phase of the project lifecycle as presented in a case study throughout the book. Project leaders will better be able to support the business analysis needs of the project by understanding the skills, expertise, tasks, resources, and time needed to do business analysis right and maximize the return on investment for each project.

Developing Strengths-Based Project Teams integrates common project management and strengths-based talent development language to help you and your project team learn about and become a strengths-based project team. Everyone has talents and strengths. Everyone does projects. This book is designed for project managers, team members, and stakeholders who have an interest in talent development—not only their own talents and strengths, but also the combined talents and strengths of their project teams. Learn about the characteristics of a strengths-based project team. Apply a series of building blocks for individual and team strengths-based development. Through exercises, templates, action plans, and reflective questions, learn how to cultivate the collective strengths of project team members to become a strengths-based project team. Explore the various project management roles for sustaining a strengths-based project team culture. Create an environment in which team members can use their talent development tools long-term to develop and apply what they naturally do best—resulting in higher project team performance.

Project implementation aligned with strategic advancement is a challenging endeavor, particularly in an environment of increasing complexity and productivity issues. Your prime issue is to plan for right action in right time, in right manner, and for the right purpose. Your attention determines the experience you end up with, and the experience determines the outcomes you have reached. Therefore, you must control your attention to control arriving at your desired outcomes. William James, in his book The Principles of Psychology (Vol I, 1890), wrote a simple statement, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” The statement is highly relevant even in the 21st century for managing high productivity through “attention management.” This third volume provides areas for attention management and focuses on diversity, team building, meaningfulness, and growing to leadership, all of which are essentially required for maximizing and cultivating the real benefits with application of project management approach in business and industry.

Developing Strengths-Based Project Teams integrates common project management and strengths-based talent development language to help you and your project team learn about and become a strengths-based project team. Everyone has talents and strengths. Everyone does projects. This book is designed for project managers, team members, and stakeholders who have an interest in talent development—not only their own talents and strengths, but also the combined talents and strengths of their project teams. Learn about the characteristics of a strengths-based project team. Apply a series of building blocks for individual and team strengths-based development. Through exercises, templates, action plans, and reflective questions, learn how to cultivate the collective strengths of project team members to become a strengths-based project team. Explore the various project management roles for sustaining a strengths-based project team culture. Create an environment in which team members can use their talent development tools long-term to develop and apply what they naturally do best—resulting in higher project team performance.

This book highlights how digital communication has brought about changes in branding, namely in design, the media, communication languages, the relationship with audiences, experience design, behaviour, culture, and brand management mechanisms. On the other hand, as it argues, artificial intelligence has opened the door to other ways of dealing with big data and communicating with mass audiences, through the customization of messages or a one-to-one logic. Overall, the book shows that the intersections between digital communication and artificial intelligence point towards a new reality in brand communication, which includes computer vision, pattern recognition, and changes in the design business and in the way communication design and branding are done.

Scrum is an agile framework for completing complex projects. This book gives examples, tools, and tricks to do Scrum well. For each trick it is explained why it helps. The practices themselves may be worth trying, but by understanding why it works the readers will be able to come up with their own ideas that work better in their organization and situation. All the practical examples in this book have helped someone, some where to become a part of a better Scrum team. Scrum’s motto is: “Inspect and Adapt”; change small things one at a time and see what works. Scrum is not done by project leaders or managers, but really by the teams—to succeed in an organization, the teams must do Scrum well. If the teams do Scrum well, the whole organization will benefit from it. Scrum helps a team self-organize, which fits in well with developers, who usually don’t like to be micromanaged. At the same time, Scrum can scale: Self-organized teams work together well, and one manager doesn’t have to manage all the people. The lessons from this book help Scrum teams develop into autonomous, proud, and independent teams. Often teams fail to become powerful enough to change the organization, so they cannot perform to their full potential. A good team can lead the stakeholders into trusting them. They will then make plans based on the team’s release planning instead of making roadmaps out of thin air, and thus make the organization much more predictable.