Creativity:

P52 clicks has an amazing community of photographers and leads a monthly-themed, weekly practice. June’s theme was full sun and, although I had little time to review their theme posts, I did manage to get out with my hubby and kids to the beach. That’s how we celebrated Canada Day. It was a beautiful day of rock-picking, ocean breathing, crab-hunting deliciousness. We rounded out our time with some fish and chips at Moby Dick’s, our local favourite in White Rock. What an amazing day to practice some full sun shooting. I especially love all the shadows that come with it.

Corporate:

Lately I’ve been focused on a lot of research, especially around Governance in a Product Organization. The framework I’m adopting is from the PMI (Project Management Institute) Governance of Portfolios, Programs, and Projects: A Practice Guide. I find it breaks down the components into manageable and understandable chunks of work, or as the professionals call them, domains:

Governance alignment: the functions and processes to create and maintain the governance framework. For me, this covers all the fundamental processes people need to follow and understand.

Governance risk: the functions and processes to identify and resolve threats and opportunities to ensure balance of risk and reward. Many a team lack a thorough, effective, yet efficient risk management framework – can I develop one with my team? We already have the Agile Audit controls covered for Internal and SOX Audit considerations. Now we need to get better at managing risk within our own Portfolio.

Governance performance: the functions and processes to ensure measurement and evaluation of KPIs against parameters and realization of business value. There’s so much to unpack here… Are our KPIs appropriate? How do we measure against them? What are the mechanisms? Who validates them? I could go on… This is where Gating processes come into play.

Governance communications: the functions and processes to disseminate information, engage stakeholders, and ensure organizational change. Many organizations get stuck on one form of communications within their governance process: the Steering Committee. But there are so many more forms of communications to many different roles.

Learning:

I should really finish Atomic Habits. I’m SO CLOSE! In the meantime, I’ve scanned through a bunch of other books I’ve gotten from the library – my recent obsession now that late fees are no longer. One of my current favourites is the Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder. The Business Model Canvas introduced to document both new organizations and existing organizations, including the organizations within organizations. I find it is applicable in many uses and helps scope the work required to move forward. I’ve used it to frame our Governance work and our new Productization organization. I rename “Revenue Streams” to “Design Principles” to make it more appropriate for us. In the near future, I’ll be using it to frame my photography business. You should try it!

Print it out or Miro has a template that can be used directly in your Mira boards. Here’s a sample: