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Recession or No Recession? Or Are We Already in One? How to Better Prepare for Both

In Business Innovation, Business Value, ConnectALL, Value Stream Management by Soumya Menon

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times…or in our case, what kind of times are we in? I just had two completely different phone calls this morning. One was with a highly qualified prospect and the other was with a client up for renewal. Both companies are in the U.S., operate in the same vertical and size of $500M – $1B, and have the same pain points of siloed teams, disparate tools, and unknown bottlenecks. But when it came to their approach about how to handle the economic uncertainties we are all in, they had …

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Address Your Company’s ‘Rock’ Or It Will Impede Forward Momentum

In Business Innovation, Business Value, ConnectALL, Tech Talk by Lance Knight

Note: Originally published on Forbes I recently was a guest on a podcast and discussed value stream management—the mechanisms of mapping the value stream, understanding flow and removing waste. I thoroughly enjoyed my session and felt that the moderator asked me some really great, thoughtful questions. I talked about one of my favorite quotes famously attributed to Peter Drucker, which is, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” While I agree wholeheartedly with this and have taken that approach throughout my professional career, another one of the quotes I shared was, “You are not managing something …

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Tick Tock, Tick Tock, Tick Tock: A Case Study on How to Be Agile and Save Time by Automating and Optimizing Your Value Streams

In Agile Transformation, Business Innovation, Business Value, ConnectALL by Soumya Menon

“Come on boss, I’ve been waiting for somebody to pick up my code, uh Uh, well don’t waste time, give me a sign, tell me how you wanna roll, uh, mm I want somebody to speed it up for me, then go with the flow, there’s enough room for both Well, I can handle that, you just gotta show me where it’s at, are you ready to go? are you ready to go?” All you developers, testers, engineers, project managers, customer service and support team members, can you imagine singing this? Familiar lyrics? Well yes, it’s Madonna, the Pop Diva, …

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Get Started Marketing at the Speed of Tomorrow Now

In Business Innovation, Business Value, ConnectALL, Marketing, Tech Talk by Lance Knight

Note: Originally published on Forbes I was preparing a webinar for my company when I decided to do a little research to uncover the current optimal length for a product or promotional webinar. I started cruising search sites and was surprised by what I found. A global marketing company with eight offices and 350 employees stretching around the globe had posted an article on that very topic. One of the “cardinal rules,” the author stated, was to never let webinars be longer than 90 minutes. They recommended 60-90 minutes and said anything more than 90 would cause the audience to …

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Resiliency and Determination: How the Challenges of 2021 Made for Remarkable Opportunities

In Business Innovation, Business Value, ConnectALL, Tech Talk by Lance Knight

Note: Originally published on Forbes Last year saw a tremendous upheaval as everyone — businesses, governments, families, doctors — experienced challenges and even loss. Yet, it was also a year of heroism and defiance as the world faced a common foe in Covid-19. Although vanquishing that foe is still a question mark, business leaders understand they must move forward. They are asking themselves, “What can I do now to position my firm for recovery and growth?” This isn’t an easy question to answer, and because the pandemic left a significant number of businesses with economic uncertainty and revenue losses, it …

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ConnectALL Global FedEx Day 2021: When Value Trumped Flow

In Business Innovation, Business Value, ConnectALL by Soumya Menon

“When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight”.  FedEx Day is an unimaginably innovative event, a “shock to the system” change-of-pace for our working lives at ConnectALL. It has developed into a culture of fun and creation. On June 30, 2021 the global team got together to present this year’s first FedEx Day — making it the third over a period of two years (the last two being May 2020 and December 2020).  And this time, one aspect in particular made it super fun: it was customer-experience centric. I guess that comes with our continuing momentum to help our …

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Humans of ConnectALL: Why Eric and His Pet Parrot Plato Joined ConnectALL

In Business Innovation, Value Stream Management by Soumya Menon

The news about Eric Robertson, an Agile, DevOps and Value Stream Management leader, joining ConnectALL, as SVP Strategic Advisor, has been a sweet surprise to everyone in the family, other industry leaders, analysts and the media. However, a lot of people in the industry have been shaking in their boots too — including competitors.  Eric is known in the industry to bring innovation onto the table and his work at ConnectALL is definitely going to transform the way our customers look at value creation and business outcomes. While Eric got his hands dirty from the word go, I managed to …

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ConnectALL’s Second FedEx Day: Innovation at the Highest Level

In Business Innovation, Business Value by Soumya Menon

After the successful launch of ConnectALL’s first FedEx Day in May 2020, we executed our second 24-hour event in December 2020. And this time it was unimaginably innovative. It came with the continuing momentum and the growth and success that came along in 2020. As you may already know, a FedEx Day is a 24-hour event that allows employees to contribute innovative ideas to their company. And like its namesake, participants have to deliver their ideas overnight. The goal of a FedEx Day is to boost motivation and creativity. And, if all goes well, the company has new features to add to its products.