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.
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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)

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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There is no Iron Triangle in Project Management. In PM we learn the holy trinity of the triple constraint, the concept that we are operating within borders, and that those borders are interdependent. Oh yeah, and "triple" or "triangle" indicates that there are three. Although the image is powerful to instruct, it is plain false. There are more than three types of constraints. Environmental, law, physical to name just a few in addition to things like time and money.

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Different project circumstances require different approaches to ensure optimum effectiveness. As mentioned over and over again on this blog, it is the people who largely determine these circumstances, and you have to tailor your project approach to the particular situation. For this you can make use of techniques and tools from different existing methods by simply mixing and matching everything together in such a way that you brew the right Project Potion for the occasion.

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There is not one way to make a great lasagna. Of course the basic idea is always the same, but depending on your taste, cooking skills and available ingredients you can have a lot of variations. Some use all fresh ingredients, make the pasta from scratch and spend several hours in the kitchen. I buy prefabricated ingredients and whip it up in several minutes. Both lasagna, but both very different.

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