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

Happy Holidays! Some reading for under the tree, or in the room away from your relatives

Countering Perverse Incentives in Project Management

"One of the hallmark traits of corporate IT is the abundance of perverse incentives." Great read.

Rhythms, Boundaries, and Containers: Creative Dynamics of Asynchronous Group Life

Monumental article by Peter and Trudy Johnson-Lenz on Groupware.

The 5 Habits Of Highly Dysfunctional Companies

"The concept of management by projects is a non-starter. The average company is not a project-driven company, and likely never will be. So why is this an idea that continues to be so prevalent? What problems - real or perceived - do it's proponents hope to address?"

Where Should The Responsibility For Project Management Really Lie?

"Project management today exists in a bizarrely schizophrenic continuum. At one extreme, there is no defined capability for project management whatsoever. Project managers reside within those business units who see sufficient value to pay their salaries, and they are expected to apply their skills and political wiles to repeatedly wrench success from the jaws of an indifferent and uncaring organization."

The Reject Gift of Project Management

"Unfortunately, projects do not come with gift receipts. Some of them should. We tend to lock our projects down with constraints the way we lock our friends and family down with Aunt Maude's Fruit Cake…"

Health Check - Who Do You Trust?

"I will fill in some questions on this checklist, and, presto, the diagnosis will appear," the Hugo Boss suit explains to you. "Do you have a health insurance?" "Do you have a document which explains all the details of the coverage of this insurance?" "Is your pharmacist ISO certified?"

The following books influenced me the most this year:

• Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another by Philip Ball
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
• A History of the Middle East by Peter Mansfield
• Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
• The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5 by Timothy Ferriss
• The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent by Richard Florida
• Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
• Social Blueprints: Conceptual Foundations of Sociology by David K. Brown
• Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development by James O. Coplien and Neil B. Harrison

As a fundamental model for projects I want to use the notion of a Complex Adaptive System (CAS). In this post I will outline what this means; what are the properties of a CAS and how are they beneficial in our quest to search for answers to project problems?

Why CAS In The First Place?

I am the first to admit that my attention to the use of complex adaptive systems is largely triggered by its current popularity. It is a new and exciting concept that is getting more and more popular, and its associated attention, in almost every scientific discipline. It is this multi-disciplinary aspect in combination with new and exciting that sparked my interest.
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A Gantt chart groups human resources with specific tasks. Further, it allows the project manager to identify dependencies between tasks, laying out the entire project in a timeline fashion. People championing the Gantt chart will tell you that it can be difficult or impossible for the project manager to correctly identify the critical path without one. They say it can help a project manager decide which employees to put on which teams.

Many people voice the concern that the format of the Gantt chart is too limiting. Edward Tufte notes how most Gantt charts for larger projects can easily turn into grid prisons, where important data is easily lost in a sea of sparse task descriptions. No real actionable To-Do lists. No substance. Just a grid prison that does more to demotivate a team than inspire it.

That's not the kind of information you want your team to be staring at from day-to-day. That's not in your face information! We live in a time where development teams use Continuous Integration systems to communicate Build Status Using Lava Lamps.
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This week I run a short series on the behavior of individuals in general.

From a very high level perspective the behavior of a person is determined by

• who he is;
• how he is at the moment;
• what he wants, and
• what he thinks will happen.

What he wants

This is actually the 64 million dollar question: what do people want? Generally spoken, people will try to reach their goals, their desires, or try to avoid their fears come true. However, this can be so generic, to I will go one step back; peoples needs. The needs of humans is their ultimate goal that drives their actions.

People have physical or material needs, think about food, a roof above their heads, or may be some kind of transportation. Although once in a while I will come back to this needs, they will not be my main focus. I assume that in the context of software projects, people are not dying of hunger or are homeless.
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