Different road condition require different suspension systems and settings to a car. If you are driving on roads in perfect mint condition, you need a different level of absorption than when you are following a trail through the jungle or the dessert.

What conditions have the roads you drive your project on?

Photography by Freeparking.

If you work under mint conditions you can create the perfect plan, centralize control and outline every detail in a procedure. You can hit the big red button that reads "EFFICIENCY".

If you drive in "EFFICIENCY" mode and steer through the jungle of Borneo, you will wreck the bottom of your car on the first turn. What you need here is absorption, the ability to handle unexpected disturbances; you need to hit the big green button with "RESILIENCE" on it.
Read more

The second half of this year will be all about "Tribes". Master marketing blogger Seth Godin has written yet another book: "Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us". Although details are not known, "according to Godin, Tribes are groups of people aligned around an idea, connected to a leader and to each other. Tribes make our world work, and always have."

Photography by The Dilli Lama.

Would this be a useful way of looking at projects?

I think so. It's always nice to jump on a hype bandwagon once in a while. And it has such a nice ring: Project Tribes.

The central element of a tribe is the leader and the idea, the goal. You need a leader who can inspire, one that can present Big Audacious Goals that seem to rock the world. Your project needs Al Gore, your project needs goals like "Save The Planet". That's why people join the gang. That's why people want to be part of it.

The goal and the leader.

The leader will set some rules of interaction. The leader will keep efforts aligned. Within this context the teams get self-organized and the Big Hairy Audacious Goal makes sure it's all in the right direction.

So it's not top down, and it's not entirely bottom up.

It's all about tribes.

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.
Read more

Software Projects are about humans… They've always been. During my study, I got inspired by Barry Boehm's Theory W, everything Fred Brooks has written, Tom DeMaro and Tom Lister, and Alistair Cockburn (for me the only person that has written intensively about the link between choice of project approach and human related issues!)

Alistair has written a great article in this months issue of CrossTalk: Good Old Advice.

"With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the best-known writers in the software field have been advocating the same four recommendations written in the agile manifesto for decades … The older writers were ignored for decades while people searched for mechanical replacements for the key elements in developing software: thinking and communicating. But that’s a separate story. It Is About People."

Yes everyone, IT IS ALL ABOUT PEOPLE.
It has always been.
It will always be.

We know it for decades.
Somehow, we just forget.

(Hat tip to Ray for pointing me to this article)

You can tell, can't you? It is a dead give away… I cannot stop thinking about resilience!

Check out the Youtube channel of The Stockholm Resilience Centre, it has informational short videos about …. resilience… like this one: What Is Resilience?



If you like podcasts, how about one hour "Resilience: Adaptation and Transformation in Turbulent Times"?

"Resilience…the capacity to absorb shocks to the system without losing the ability to function. Can whole societies become resilient in the face of traumatic change? In April 2008, natural and social scientists from around the world gathered in Stockholm, Sweden for a first-ever global conference applying lessons from nature’s resilience to human societies in the throes of unprecedented transition."

Panarchy provides us a wide angle lens to look at projects. Originating from socio-ecological field studies this powerful concept lets us capture the project, the individual team members and the embedding organization in one go. Previously I discussed the ideas behind Panarchy: the adaptive cycle, multiple scales and the interaction of multiple scales. In this post, I'll explore what these aspects mean for resilience, the capacity, e.g. of a project to adapt to changes.

Photography by t3rmin4t0r.

The interactions between the different scales across a panarchy are important in respect to resilience. In terms of Panarchy, three elements are considered: the focal system (in our case "the project"), the higher scales (e.g. the company, or professional group, or society) and the lower scales (e.g. individuals or teams).
Read more