Author: Shana Wedemeyer

Consultant Speak vs. the Nitty Gritty

For nearly 30 years, I’ve enjoyed working in the government technology industry, focused on serving the State of California. Along the way, I’ve met and worked with hundreds of amazing consultants with business and technical expertise. In recent years, I’ve become sensitive to what our…

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How Many Balls Are You Juggling?

The Prosci ADKAR individual model of change (Awareness – Desire – Knowledge – Ability – Reinforcement) posits that people must first be aware of the need for a change before they can commit to it. Yet we all know situations where we firmly believe a change is…

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Congratulations to Our Newly Certified SAFe Agilists!

Highlands is proud to announce that nine of our consultants are now certified in the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe): Nikki Angle, Demetre Haralambakis, Michele Rickey-Pidd, Mike Cappelluti, Eric Norton, Will Cuper, Judy Melson, Amanda Priest, and Jacob Olson. SAFe delivers a strategy for implementing Agile at…

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Case Study: Owning the Change Determines IT Success

The Highlands Consulting Group is assisting the State of California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD) with implementation of ePlanCheck (ePC), a tool for the electronic submission, review, and approval of architecture and other building plans. ENVISION: We are using our knowledge of…

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Organizational Change Management in an Agile Environment

In our last blog post, my colleague Nikki Angle wrote about the myths and realities of Agile in government. It’s a significant shift that requires increased communication, readiness assessments, training, and reinforcement – all components that we deliver every day through organizational change management. Two State of California…

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Teaching Our Clients to Fish

The proverb goes “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Perhaps one reason that Highlands Consulting routinely hears positive feedback from our clients, and one of the reasons…

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Newly Certified Scrum Masters!

As the Agile methodology gains momentum on many of our clients’ projects, Highlands Consulting has been engaged to lead and support various Scrum activities. Last year, Michele Rickey-Pidd became a Certified Scrum Master, enabling her lead a Scrum team on a large State health care…

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Insights from the ACMP Conference

Jim Turko recently attended the Association of Change Management Professionals (ACMP) conference in Orlando, Florida.  Over the course of three days, he participated in numerous events with people passionate about sharing their change management knowledge and ideas.  The sessions offered great insight about how change…

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Run or Dye Fun Run!

Our Michele Rickey-Pidd and her State client staff had a messy-fun time at the “Run or Dye” 5K run last Saturday, March 22nd. Talk about teambuilding!  Plus, proceeds benefited four local charities.

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Congratulations to Jim Turko!

Jim Turko has been busy! In addition to keeping his client commitments, Jim became a Certified Prosci® Instructor in 2013. He has already delivered two 3-day Prosci Certification courses, resulting in 16 consultants certified in the Prosci® change management methodology.  As if that’s not enough, Jim…

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