Sorry for the slow pace in postings recently. I traveled to London for a short holiday. LOVED IT! If we have one World City in Europe, it must be London. Anyway, I am back, and have some nice postings lined up for the next weeks, as we are approaching the one year anniversary of Project Shrink.

In the meantime I want to put your attention to a new category of postings I have created: Lenses. Gateway articles that each cover a certain topic from my blog and form an index to related articles.

Project Management: We Need Gumby!
Introducing The Fish Pond
On Why Project Sociology
Projects As Social Interactions

Recently Project Shrink has had an enormous increase in new readers. At this moment the Feedburner counter shows 14460 readers! WOW! I am very happy to welcome you all! The blog in its current form is almost a year old (July!), but my main site SoftwareProjects.org originates from 2001.

Photography by bfick.

If you have only been a reader of this blog, you might want to check out the following reports/articles:

• "Using Stakeholder Analysis in Software Project Management" (PDF)
• "Project Profiling With Systems Thinking" (PDF)
• "How Project Management Will Get Its Groove Back" (PDF)
• "Learn Project Management In 15 Minutes" video page

Please, dig around the site, use the search function, or leave a comment if you have a question or remark.

Thanks for reading the blog!

Cheers
Bas de Baar

In the previous post I used a picture of myself leaving the medina of Fes, Morocco through the gate. For me, this old city is a great illustration of human complexity.

When discussing abstract concepts like networks of humans, complex adaptive systems and their fractal nature (a society is a large organization, an organization is a large group of people etc …) you sometimes can loose the link to reality. What is the picture you have in your mind when dealing with these concepts? While we are discussing the fish pond as metaphor, I want to share with you the image of the medina of Fes, Morocco.
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Now is a good time for reflection. 2007 was an exciting year for me and SoftwareProjects.org. This year I started searching for a proper whole for PM. I am looking for a true Project Management Body Of Knowledge, one that is based on psychology, sociology, organizational behavior, complex adaptive systems, and whatever might help us out. This quest started in February with the first draft of "How Project Management Will Get Its Groove Back". This paper created so many responses that I spent the remainder of the first half of this year reading up on sociology and adapative systems. My head still spins from all those great discussions

During the summer of 2007 I switched jobs. After working for over a decade in the publishing industry, I decided to give financial institutions a try. Because of this I had two months holiday this year (June and July) in between jobs in which I picked up blogging again and experimented with some formats.

Stuff I tried and liked:

• Asking questions as basis for an essay. This resulted in my favorites for this year: How Male Machismo Shaped Project Management, Why Agile Popped Up on the Radar When it Did and Why do Developers contribute to Open Source?
• Using the SIMS for animations
• Using the webcam for videocasts
• Trying to give some new spins to existing views of the profession

Next year will be more intense. I will boost up production. Aim for higher quality. And if you read to previous bullet list, you will get an idea of what I will be doing. Heck, I will start right now… So, see you in the next year!

And I really hope you will stay tuned to my blog!

Cheers
Bas

PS Check out "Software development trends in 2008: Outsourcing, agile development". Of course I am also in it

A while ago I asked a group of you, my readers, my beloved, loyal readers, "If you have 10 minutes, how do you judge a project manager?" I have used the answers to that question for my monthly column at TechTarget… (you might have to register, but its free, and you have access to a lot of other interesting stuff).

The best summary of the responses is given by this statement: "If they just use jargon from the PMBok, I put them on the lower end of the scale. If they talk about the importance of stakeholders and people in general I put them on the high end of the scale. The PMBok hardly covers stakeholders, so they must have been in the trenches."