Otetsudai Networks

"With Otetsudai Networks, if you are willing to work, you sign up for the service with your skills and focus, take a GPS reading on your phone and then just hang out. If you are looking for someone for say… 3 hours to man a cash register or help wash dishes, you just send the request to Otetsudai Networks and within minutes, you have a list of people available."

5 Reasons Distributed Teams Suck

"Realistically, people work better together remotely once they have met face to face. Distributed teams have a smaller carbon footprint, but knowing when to make footprints to get in once place is key."

Scrappy Project Management Promo Video

Funny! Funny video. Kimberly Wiefling is promoting her new project management book. Don't know the book, but you just gotta love the lady!

10 Lessons in Guerilla Tactics of Project Management

"While many brilliant books and articles have been written on good project management, there is little attention paid to all the possibilities a project manager has to create the appearance of managing a project well without the burden of actually doing it."

Six Ways To Avoid Work On Software Projects

My six golden rules to beat every planning: 1)Fuzziness is your friend, 2)Increase dependencies for input, 3) Elastic scope, 4) Adding more tasks, 5) Write large closing reports, and 6) Pure bluff: Who checks anyway?

The Meaning of Rigor in Project Management

Rigor is a popular topic among IT project managers, often used in the context of describing how a PM should adhere to a particular process. Its been on my mind quite a bit lately, and Ive made some conclusions about what rigor

What is the most important task of a Project Manager? (makes a great dinner discussion if you want to get rid of your guests :))

Planning? No!
Control? You wished… NO!
Communication… HECK NO!

The answer is… allocation of scarce resources.

Come again?

You have limited time, your money pit is not without bottom, you have only a handful of team members, you have all those elements that you can only deploy in a certain way, and it's your job to allocate them in such a way that is most ideal in certain circumstances. 'Allocation of scarce resources" is the name of the PM game.

To be able to do this you need those risk analysis logs.
You need list of requirements that are prioritized.
You need a plan to see how decisions might affect current ideas about the future.
You need a clear goal to have a beacon to steer your project towards to.
You need communication to get the right information to base your allocations on.

You all need that. And more.

Still, on top of all this… allocation of scarce resources.

It is like a game of chess, it is all about moving your pieces.

And before anyone asks… most important PM skill is the ability to negotiate.

Absolute must-read: The Next-Generation Workforce and Project Management

The workplace is changing in ways not due entirely to the introduction of new technology or new philosophies of management. The workforce itself is changing. The rise of the millennial generation brings workers who are more introspective, more connected to the world and their community, and less willing to align themselves to the needs of employers.

Read this introduction if you are new to this blog.

This post functions as an index to key postings on my blog. Look at it as a Table Of Contents.

Some links to external sites are included, as there are so many subjects I would like to cover, but didn't find time to write yet.

Enjoy!

History, Now and Future of Project Management

Project Management Is Dead
The Long Tail In Software Projects
Project Management 3.0
How Male Machismo Shaped Project Management
Why Agile Popped Up on the Radar When it Did
Flight of the Creative Class
Project Management From The Medina
Bottoms Up: Leadership Style For A Better World
Project Management Code: Why Do You Do What You Do?
The Big Pond: Global Village

People As Models For Projects

Project Profiler: The True Agile PM
My Current Model For PM
Projects As Social Interactions
Complex Adaptive Systems
Projects As A Complex Adaptive System: Why Bother?
The Sims As A Project Model
Sims Project Model: Tiffanys Lust
Sims Project Model: Berts Lack Of Recognition
Reality Refuses To Follow Your Plan
Explaining PM Approaches
Four Mechanisms In PM Methods
Balancing Agility And Discipline
Why Societies And Projects Fail Or Succeed
Project Profiling With Systems Thinking
Estimating actual project progress - Download metaphor
Mental model building and forecasting the project future
Distributed Problem Solving With Agents With Scarce Resources Of Different Skill Sets
- Setting priorities
- Decision making
Adaption And Resilience Of The System
How Are Overall Goals Established?
Sensing
Creative Breakthroughs And Project Management
Lessons from bioteams
Scenario Planning And Attractors
Need For Speed - Timing Within The System
Fractal: Projects Within Organizations Within Societies
Project Managers Cannot Rely On Generalizations

Looking At The Behavior Of An Individual - Psychology

Driving On The OODA Highway
Individual Behavior - Who Am I?
Individual Behavior - How Am I Doing?
Individual Behavior - What I Want
What Is The Best Way To Motivate Team Members?

People Behaving In Groups - Sociology

Why The Customer Always Wants His Stuff Tomorrow
Information Radiators and Batman
Project Sociology - Part 1
Project Sociology - Part 2
Telecommuting: Just A Matter Of Trust?
Treehugger Project Management: Trust
Are You The Center Of Your Network?
How One Thing Leads To Another
Deviant Behavior In Project Management
Why Suits Create Suits
What Drives Project People?
Why do Developers contribute to Open Source?
Does Openness Lead To Less Deviant Behavior?
Social OODA Super Speedway

Cultural Differences

Dealing With Cultural Differences In Projects

Interactions Between People

Along Task structure

Big Design Up-Front
Using Iterations
Critical Chain Project Management

Along Power structure

Stratification: Organizational Structures In A Pond

Along Information structure

Swimming Upstream The Information Flow
Carbon-Copy Paradox
The Death Of Gantt Charts?
Kanban

Train The Brain

3 Steps Towards Becoming An Agile Project Manager
Management And Meditation

Tools and Techniques

The TOC Thinking Processes
Productivity Tools and Techniques
Software That Tells You Bob Will Be Unhappy
Future of PM Software: WhoDoes
Future of PM Software: TenForce
Method Components Have a Reason: Scrum
Data visualization and design

Fish Pond

Complexity of Management
Our Need For Metaphors
The Fish Pond Metaphor
Filter And Drainage - Trust Running Through The Team
Indirect Control By Just Looking
Fish And OODA Loops
Lessons From The Pond For The Project Workforce

Work moves around. If it can be produced cheaper, more efficiently or better, it gets relocated.

Talent moves around. If one area on the globe is more exciting and thrilling than another, people relocate.

Works moves around. And people that perform the work move around. Not necessarily dependent of each other.

Regional population changes rapidly. Asia gets a booming population growth. First world nations have a enormous amount of seniors coming towards them as the babyboomers are getting old. With regional changes in the populations, the demand for work shifts.

Nobody can tell you how the patterns will turn out. Where will be what. Who will get what.

One thing will be sure, it will be global, spread out, and on the move!

That is the vivid image I got from The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent by Richard Florida.

Oh yeah… and if you want to attract talent, you have to provide a tolerant and creative society… duh!

Welcome to Amsterdam …

In my series called "Future of Project Management Software" I am talking with PM Software vendors about their view of the future. This time a conversation with Massimo Sgrelli from GotThingsDone, the Project Management Software company that brings us WhoDoes.

How do you think Project management Software will look like in 5-10 years?

Definitely easier to use and designed for the real world. Project management, as its usually understood, is a full time activity at least on medium-large projects. In such a project, when big changes have to be applied to the enterprise, you usually have dedicated teams from the Program Management Office “ PMO. You need them to manage information flow and make intelligible changes to the whole firm. However you have to remember that this doesnt fulfill actual teams needs. Complex projects have always been brought to succeed by a lot of small teams. Project management at this level, in the real world, is really different. Too often we try to control, instead of making people (e)talk to each other, improving information sharing and letting them know what is supposed to be done every day. What we really need are tools to manage the real world. So the natural evolution of PM software in the medium term will bring us to relax some misleading control leverages, making it easier for our people to know exactly what we expect them to do day-by-day, in order to make projects succeed.

What are the technologies that will be driving the software?

The Internet and mobile computing in particular could help us share information and have our daily to-do list on hand. They help keep the data and the team near us wherever we are. Also the web and technologies like Ajax or the emerging tendencies to mash up services, will be the driving force of the new software capabilities. When I say the web I dont only mean the browser, but a new breed of fat (or thin) client applications, specifically designed for mobile devices like the iPhone “ Ive got one and now I cant live without it. Things like the Internet and Google Maps API have enabled business companies like Apple to do Maps, a Google Earth interface for the iPhone. I can assure you that its definitely more powerful than its browser based version.

How do you think tools will support proper communication between mobile, multi-cultural teams?

In order to make project management tools really usable we need to make them really simple, easier to use - and also cheap. More and more companies will have people working remotely and living in different countries. It means different ways of thinking and intending project coordination. In these cases you will be forced to come back to the essential. Share the information as soon as you can and let people know every morning whats in their task list. Everything else is secondary.

How do you think tools will build a sense of community?

Actually, talking about community isnt as simple when applied to project management. Lets try it this way: To work well people need to be happy. They need to use essential and useful tools; it makes them happy because theres no wasting of time. Tools must be online and accessible. Communication among team members must be ubiquitous.

Its all a mix of "useful" and "fun".

All these things together will help create a sense of community.

How do you think tools will keep the team focused on the overall goal?

Keeping people focused is always crucial to projects success. There are two main factors that will contribute to this goal: simplicity and method. A tool must adhere to these principles if you want to have a seamless adoption. Simplicity means including in your tool only the essential features: not everybody needs to access Pert diagrams “ probably no one needs at all. Less is more, in this case. Then you have to be clear about what information you want your users primarily, to manage. In my opinion the only important information people in a team must take under control is what they have to accomplish that day.

How will decisions be supported (about features, about allocation of resources)?

The only way I know to support decisions is talk about them with people. Even better, sharing thoughts in a forum or in a chat so you wont be interrupted when you work.

What makes your current product different than other Project Management Software?

We strongly feel that project success depends on two factors:

• Every person in your team must know what to do every morning
• Information must be shared in real time

WhoDoes, our project management product, has been primarily designed to fulfil to these needs. Planning project activities isnt a simple task and people must understand that you can solve 80% of the problem making people communicate effectively.