When your company is struggling with projects, when all Project Managers are PMP certified, when every conceivable procedure seems to be in place, it is time to turn to The Fifth Discipline. No, this is not some kind of dark society. It is the art of creating a learning organization. Ever since Peter Senge put forth the idea of "five disciplines" in the early 1990s, business management thinking has not been the same.

This article takes a brief look at each of the disciplines espoused by Senge, which, according to him, are the hallmarks of a "learning" organization:

• Personal Mastery
• Mental Models
• Systems Thinking
• Shared vision, and
• Team learning.

In the backdrop of software projects, systems thinking, personal mastery and mental models work on the level of the individual, while the concept of shared vision and team learning have more to do with team dynamics. This is applicable for the project manager / leader as well as the team member. Every discipline will have relevant links to articles on Project Shrink, so you can plan ideas for improvement.

Personal Mastery

Photography by Mind meal.
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It has been almost ten months since I outlined my last model of Project Management. The importance of having some kind of mental image about projects and Project Management may not come as a surprise. We are long due for an update on how I think everything links together.

Photography by Elvire R.

People Operating In A Group

Whatever your take is on projects, at the end of the day it is just a bunch of people working together to achieve a certain goal. During this endeavor they laugh, cry, pull pranks, play dirty tricks and have all other kind of behavior towards each other. If you are lucky they even work to reach the final goal. If you take everything away, and put people in the center of what a “project” is, you will see a group of stakeholders interacting with each other, just like any other group of people would do.
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How Our Project Management Education And Recruitment Creates Stiffs When We Need Gumby's

Just for the record I have no problems with Project Management methods. Prince 2, PMBoK, SCRUM, Latest Lean Hype. They are all fine by me.

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The world is changing dramatically, fast and beyond everything we have seen. Globalization and technology have introduced more diversity, more dynamics and more interdependencies than ever before. This provides project management, and management in general, with a challenge. How to survive in this environment? Together with dr Ali Anani, I am taking on this challenge with an attempt to provide some structure and some answers for management practitioners.

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We are currently in the era of agile methodologies. Before that we had our plan driven approaches. Software development had its structured design and its object oriented design. I am not suggesting that they are all the identical, this is not an post about how we recycle the same ideas again and again in different packages. I am not even saying that they are all bad, or even all good. As our profession progresses and matures we can just add more tools to our project management toolbox for software development and implementations. We are all waiting for what the next big thing will be. Read more

Whatever your take is on projects, at the end of the day it is just a bunch of people working together to achieve a certain goal. During this endeavor to laugh, cry, pull pranks, play dirty tricks and have all other kind of behavior towards each other. If you are lucky they even work to reach the final goal. If you take everything away, and put people in the center of what a "project" is, you will see a group of stakeholders interacting with each other, just like any other group of people would do.

Just to make things easier on our lives, we call the result of all this behavior "the project". In this sense it is nothing more than an abstraction. If we say "the project is late", this doesn't mean that some creature or entity from outer space showed up later than expected; it is the result of the project people working together that wasn't finished on the time we predicted.
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