A short while ago I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Maria Gajewski of Never The Same River Twice. You can read the entire interview on her blog. She asked me

Photography by Ron Almog.

• How I came to the conclusion that “Projects Are About Humans, Now Deal With That!”?
• Why it is this so important to have mental flexibility and what is one thing that you can do right now to increase our mental flexibility?
• How a project manager can help his or her team increase their resilience?
• What will be happening here at Project Shrink in the next few months?

… and more.

Hop over, read the interview, and while you are there, subscribe to this blog about personal and organizational change.

My column at TechTarget this month is called "Offshore outsourcing projects: Seven things every PM should know"

1. Stereotype!

All Americans carry a gun. All Dutch people are cheapskates. All French waiters…well, don't get me started! We humans love to stereotype. We simply need to. If there is one part in our brain that is "unknown," if there is a spot in our universe we have no clue about, we go mental. We have to fill in some "stub" information if the real information is not available to us. Even when we know that the information we use is not correct. We are more comfortable with false information than with no information.

Photography by Gadongen76.
The other six are:

2. You are wrong!
3. It's different!
4. Communicate!
5. Embrace overhead
6. Baby steps!
7. Be swell!

Read more.

One way of getting resilience (the ability to adapt) into your projects, is to be able to scale up your project fast and easy. Adding capacity when you need it without having a large lead time. Sounds like utopia to you? Well friends, plug yourself into the grid we call the Internet and make use of Virtual Testing. Test capacity on demand.

I talked with Bruce Daley of Test Common to get some insight.

Photography by fdcomite.
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Currently I am tracking 85 blogs related to "Project Management". Last month I found these ten postings highly remarkable and interesting:

Conspiracy vs. Collaboration
Place Those Small Bets, Quickly!
The Definitive List of Software Development Methodologies
Systems
How to Write a Book
5 Ways to Be A Naturally Visible Leader
Thoughts on Austhink Software's work with Business Decision Mapping
I need to build a house, what kind of hammer should I buy?
Living, Learning and Leading in an Increasingly Virtual World
Professionalism = Knowledge First, Experience Last

You can get my daily recommendations of great postings by subscribing to this RSS feed:
http://www.softwareprojects.org/reader

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My monthly column at TechTarget.com is up: "Software project managers should allow for experimentation" (original title: We Have No Clue. So What To Do?).

Photography by Ctd 2005.

"The solution is so simple. But somehow, "experimenting" lost its appeal. Management (with a capital "M") doesn't allow uncertainties. The whole quality hype didn't help us either, with its "zero defects" and "doing it right the first time" crap. It just means we should think before we do something. It doesn't mean we should kill everyone that needs a second attempt! Heck, even Frederick Brooks wrote in his classic The Mythical Man Month "the management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that." His advice? Plan to throw one away."

Read the entire article.

Currently I am tracking 90 blogs related to Project Management. Last month I found these ten postings highly remarkable and interesting:

It's the sociology, telecommuters
Silos & Empires
The Emerging and Strange Alliance Between Boomers and Millennials
7 Reasons for the Rapid Growth of Project Management in IT
Engaging middle management in “Enterprise 2.0?
The Difference Difference Makes
Trading Places with Indian Outsourcers
Do We Learn From Our Mistakes?
Women In Management: Shirts or Skirts - Who's The Better Manager?
Middle-Management Crisis Escalates

You can get my daily recommendations of great postings by subscribing to this RSS feed:
http://www.softwareprojects.org/reader

Read this for more information.