by Ali Anani and Bas de Baar

Times are changing. The world is getting smaller. World orders are shifting. The ocean is turning into a pond. That is the whole idea behind the Fish Pond Metaphor. In this posting we will have a more detailed look about the globalization, into people interacting on a global scale. What is going on in The Big Pond?

What Drives Human Behavior?

Our investigation starts however on the lowest level: the individual inhabitant of our planet. What is driving their behavior? What is determining the way they interact with other people? Our journey has to start here before we can make some sense of the overall result of all those interactions a global scale. Read more

First attempt I will be starting with a few short videocasts like this one to accompany the creation of "The Fish Pond Metaphor".

by Ali Anani and Bas de Baar

As a Project Manager you are now more than ever faced with the fact that part of your team is at the other end of the world. Different cultures, different time zones, different languages, different customs. You hardly see them, let alone know them. A part of the team (and stakeholders) may permanently be on the move. They are multitasking beyond compare. It is rare if someone is dedicated fulltime to one project. For most of them you dont have fulltime tasks. You need more and more different specializations for every new project you take on. More people doing more fragmented tasks.

Globalization has affected the work environments in many ways. Now, we refer to the networked world as a small village. This has led to many new aspects of project management such as self-organizing teams, risk management, information poverty, virtual teams and project management, information economy, and many other aspects. The question in mind is to find a suitable metaphor that fulfills these requirements. What other systems that lived within a large space and then moved into small space? Read more

by Ali Anani and Bas de Baar

Turn on your television and try not to look at CSI Miami, NYC or Tonopah. It is amazing how popular crime series are, crime series where the technicians will save the day. It must be a universal thing, as the series are as popular in Europe as in The United States. For a Project Manager it is a great inspiration. They find a dead corpse and an FBI Profiler is brought on the scene. He looks around, sniffs the air and creates a nice profile of the potential killer. Gut feeling, combined with a mix of experience and science may transform a dark alley into a rich source of evidence.

When looking daily at the remains of your planning you probably feel like an FBI Profiler, or more appropriate, a Project Profiler. Look at the evidence and know the problem: death by control. Like at the FBI, based upon assumptions a profile is created. New information can lead to new assumptions and a new profile. But also the underlying assumptions steer the direction of the investigation, hoping to find evidence that support the probability of the profile. So, it is not just a matter of information gathering, and presto, you have a clear cut description of the problem. It is a lot of backward and forward reasoning. Based upon some first sparse info snippets assumptions are made, and as time progresses you get a cycle of assumptions leading to the direction of investigation and information leading towards change in assumptions. Read more

Why Reality Will Not Stick To Your Plan

by Ali Anani and Bas de Baar

Project life can be quite frustrating when one day after another turns out not how you planned it. The software should be ready when you said it would. It has to. Otherwise you have people waiting, customers complaining and bosses getting annoyed. It is your reputation and ultimately your job on the line. If you just plan harder, more detailed, than the plan must be correct. Right? Of course not. It is a shock for a lot of people, but you cant force reality in sticking to your plan. Forget it. It is not going to happen. Ever. Looking at management practices in general around corporations around the globe, it seems to be a habit hard to break, a state of mind hard to get rid of.

Having a false mental model of how it all works “ projects, management, people, reality “ has disastrous results. IT Projects have a high failure rate with poor estimating, planning and Project Management as one of the main reasons why. If you think you can predict the future, if you think you can plot the path reality has to take, but in fact you cant, you have the source of the high failure rate of projects.
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