Career Management: The Key to Employee Retention

If you missed Ken Leslie's presentation on Employee Retention at the Xplor Conference in Miami Beach, you missed a humorous information packed session.  Practical tips for motivating and retaining your most valuable asset were the themes of the session including how to use career management basics for employee growth and retention. Some tips included:

·         Engage your employees in Career Management

·         Provide resources they need to grow based on their plan

·         Create opportunities for employees

·         Message reinforcement

·         Build your replacement

Contact Ken if you would like to hear more.

Is Agile the Methodology of Choice?

Are company's shifting their software development approach from traditional development methodologies to Agile?  Statistics are hinting that companies are outsourcing many of their software development projects, not offshore, but instead to U.S. based consulting firms.  Liz Barnett of Forrester Research was quoted as saying, "Approximately two-thirds of large organizations working with Forrester are adopting (overtly or inadvertently) some form of Agile process for their internal application development efforts."

Similarly, contacts in our network are stating that larger companies are attempting to implement Agile process with little success and have instead hired consultants to come in and train employees.  According to our source, Agile Methodologies are being used by anywhere from 200-400 U.S. companies.

Ken Schwaber, Agile guru and co-founder of the Scrum process has stated that he is convinced that Agile is sweeping away the traditional methods, especially in companies where their primary business is software development.