Most approaches to project management concentrate on the tasks which need to be successfully completed to achieve the project goal. Important as this is, it is at most only half of the story of successful project management. The C3 approach addresses the hidden side of project management - the people-collaboration-end-result perspective and is also a powerful tool for conducting a quick project healthcheck.

I had a fascinating conversation with Rini Das, CEO of Pakra Games, where we discussed my work on business games and how it related to the theories and practices of bioteams which Rini subsequently published here.

Over the last 6 months I have been designing, testing and piloting an exciting new Change Management Game for leaders and teams which lets them experience what it is like to lead a complete 9-month change management project over the course of a single day. The development process forced me to think through what I really believe to be the key principles of change management in a sufficiently clear and concrete way to be able to design an online/offline game round them. Here is what I ended up with:

Strategy and Business Magazine has just published an excellent in-depth article "The Dueling Myths of Business" based on the work of scenario planning expert Betty Sue Flowers who worked with Royal Dutch Shell PLC and the world of big government where she helped draft many influential scenario planning reports.

ISEE Systems, a leading developer of business simulation tools, have published reviews of two of the new Bioteams online/offline collaboration games developed using the ithink platform. These team games enable companies to share their own best practice (learn from others) in a way that really sticks and to put staff into difficult but realistic decision-making situations where if they make a mistake it does not cost the business!

There are two neat tools you can use to quickly turn excel spreadsheets into online simulations, what-if models and dashboards. They are Simulate from Forio and Crystal Presentation Design (formerly known as xcelsius) from SAP. Here's the lowdown.

Bioteams readers might be interested to know that I have just launched Cohort - an Online Change Management Game which challenges players to explore different strategies to gain the support of a group of senior executives for a major change initiative. The game is designed to be used in leadership development workshops with up to 20 participants playing competitively in teams.

Gamification, the use of game play mechanics for non-game applications, is a very topical area with many enterprises exploring how they might use it to generate new levels of engagement with their staff or customers (current and prospective). In this article I review some popular gamification approaches/techniques and provide a reading list for further study. I cover 4 key aspects of Gamification: Objectives, Frameworks, Building Blocks and Implementation Risks/Mitigations.

I am pleased to announce the development of a unique Business Social Media Impact Forecasting Simulator which provides a simple but scientific approach to developing clear and credible forecasts of the impact including financial benefits of social media campaigns before they are undertaken.

There are a plethora of excel add-Ins out there, many of which aim to improve or extend a feature which excel already performs. I am not much interested in these but what I am interested in is add-ins which enable you to do something really useful which you cannot currently do in excel. In this article I introduce seven excel add-ins which meet this criterion - NodeXL, Solver, Rainbow, Spreadsheet Converter, Crystal Ball, Fractal Maps and XCell Compiler.

There are about half a dozen basic dilemma stereotypes which underpin almost all of the operational and strategic issues which challenge leaders today. These are so prevalent and pervasive I call them the META DILEMMAS because they are present in virtually every leadership situation.

I develop custom business games for team-based experiential learning workshops which usually have a significant computer element. This whole area is strewn with pitfalls, good intentions and misconceptions and there is a huge risk that the game becomes too complex or an end in itself or the graphical aspect of the user interface becomes all consuming at the expense of the learning.

Many business models used by enterprises have never been calibrated using the organisation's own historical data which seriously undermines their usefulness. This is generally not due to the lack of historical data but because of the way the models have been designed. So can you build business models which do not suffer from this fatal flaw? Absolutely!

Data Mining, a hi-tech buzzword for many years, is about excavating useful patterns which are hidden deep in your data to give you valuable insights you could not otherwise find. I was looking for a data mining tool in the same broad price bracket as Excel but which was also robust and did not require you to be a mathematics genius to use it. Surprisingly I managed to find a product which exactly met my needs!

Here is an excellent web link plus two great books which address the question which diagram or chart should I use to best communicate different types of information visually. With at least 40 types of diagram and new ones/variants constantly being invented this is a hot topic!

One of the most useful aspects of Microsoft Excel is its ability to quickly slice and dice customer data from live systems to identify important trends and behaviors which can inform strategy. In this article and screencast I share a 7-step plan, illustrated with a worked example, for Instant Customer Analytics using Excel.

Building Community and Computer Simulation are two of my hot topics. So it really grabbed my attention when Channel 4 Education announced a forthcoming game, Fallen City, to let us explore how our cities might be mended by empowering communities.

In an excellent article in The Observer, Keith Stuart argues that the reason video games are so popular is not because we are simply escaping reality but because the best of these games provide us with valuable experiences in learning, autonomy, authority, feedback and risk-taking. This argument also resonates with a book I am reading "Reality is Broken" by Jane McGonigal.

I have been thinking for a long time about developing an online game for High-Performing Teams which was complex enough to be useful but simple enough to be usable! I am pleased to introduce the A4 Team Game (Alignment, Attitudes, Attention and Autonomy) which can be configured for different team challenges and runs on the desktop, the web or even embedded in other applications.

One of the challenges for teams is that the achievement of some of their goals are not fully under their own control - they need to be achieved in partnership with, or even in spite of, external parties (stakeholders) who are working to their own agendas and priorities. The Stakeholder Collaboration Game allows teams to simulate increasingly complex scenarios involving multiple goals and multiple stakeholders.